Actually the four mistakes Motorola did here in europe a) Lock down the milestone and b) Do not push out bugfix updates in a timely manner, usually if at all months behind the US by that frustrate the non geek crowd c) Lock the bootloader to the general public so that the users cannot fix the firmware themselves and what
Fourth mistake d) Tell your own european users who rightfully ask for an open bootloader so that they can fix the shoddy firmware themselves to make a hike and go buy somewhere else (this has happened more than once over here)
In other words, Motorolas arrogance shot them out of the market, and not just the geek market!
Actually that is just my first hands experience here with the Milestone. A year ago everyone recommended it, but as soon as the people recognized they are not getting bugfix updates or are getting them months behind the USA and as soon as the geek percentage realized the sideway of custom roms also was blocked it straight went into the do not buy list for many. And I have seen more than a handful of negative recommendations regarding Motorola here. If anything could have been done wrong with the Milestone it went wrong and Motorola single handedly gave away a potential 800 Mio markets. So to say, the Milestone was Motorolas second chance over here, they blew it big time and actually you now can see a lot of people running around with Android phones but not a single one using a Motorola anymore (it used to be different a year ago) I live in europe so this is my first hands experience, yours might differ. Motorola still is listed in the various phone telco lists, but no one really buys their phones anymore.
Actually in Europe the word of mouth regarding the Motorola shennanigans regarding the bootloader spread pretty quickly. Add to that that Motorola Europe basically treated their customers like second class citizens regarding updates on the Milestones and a bunch of if you dont like the bootloader buy somewhere else comments by the official support over here for the following year, and you can see a scheme where the general public became overly frustrated and Motorola quickly went from the only decent Android phone available directly straight to the do not buy list in the general public.
Yes the general public does not care about locked bootloaders, but it starts to care if they have a buggy firmware and no possibility for a software update and if you ask the manufacturer you are told, it is either our way or the highway. So basically whatever Motorola could do wrongly they did and it pays off for them negatively. The Milestone never became more than a mediocre success due to the bad rep it got immediately, and the following models bombed literally. I dont think if anyone from Motorola USA is reading this, but they defintiely should do, they just lost a market of 800 Mio people!
Depends on the transitions are very smooth in the 3d gallery of stock android, to bad that most phones use their own gallery instead of the 3d one which is absolutely superior to anything else on any platform, the ios gallery is a joke compared to the android one.
Well the problem here is that western europe can be seen as the closest and only realy friends the US has, if they betray event them, then who else is left? On the other hand, the US has a history of broken contracts and promises just ask the US indians, while in Europe a contract is something which has to be fulfilled. Not sure if the US was bargaining on this when the lobbied for the contract.
Actually there is a shitload of very innovative games in the independend scene, but Angry Birds is not one of them. And yes he is right to a big degree the innovation happens in the independend scene currently where people push out games like Braid, De Blob, Amnesia, Minecraft, The Ball and others. The problem simply is that this comes from the mouth of someone who has a very good game out which deservedly is highly successful, but on the originiality scale it is a rehash of some game ideas of the 80s and 90s.
Actually Angry Birds gameplay stems even back to the first computer games, does anyone of you guys still remember one of the first multiplayer games where two players where behind their own castle and the entire gameplay evolved around hitting the other player. There were myriads of variants of this gameplay, one being single player with different levels the other one being multiplayer with two players etc...
There is no general source, and in fact various places are identified of the origin of the atlantis myth. The highest possibility is Thera/Santorini which comes closest, the site the article talks about is also a bronze age civilisation in spain which also fell around the mid bronze age. Also there is a handful of other mediterenneaen civilisations which would be candidates. What I would exclude is the flooding of the mediterranean basin and the black sea, that had been too long before Platos time to give anything meaningful anymore. But given the lack of resources on the Egyptian side and they have documented a lot of their works in stone, it is very likely that Plato made everything up and no Atlantis legend was existent anymore in his time, but some other legends around Thera and the sea people might have been still floating around in Egyptian records.
Actually Thera before the eruption had a circular like harbor structure, when thera was blasted off the ground by the eruption the area was unpassable by ships thanks to the volcanic output for quite some time. Also Thera was one of the highest developed civilizations of its time (they even had a water toilet and multi floored buildings) so at least the memory regarding Thera could be related to Plato. I also dont believe Atlantis as such ever existed, but there are several occasions in history which could ultimately have lead to such a legend in Platos time. The probably by then in legend unforgotton explosion of Thera probably was one such event, the sea peoples invasion of the southeastern mediterrenean also was another such occasion.
Actually yes , it is most likely, but there might be some truth behind it nevertheless. There was a big invasion of the eastern mediterranean sea by of what the egyptians called the sea peoples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples, it was a mass migration combined with an invasion which brought several highly developed bronze age cultures to a downfall and Egypt on the brink of collapse. No one really knows who those people were, but they are a fact conserved in letters and writings of that period. They are definitely not survivors of the Thera desaster that happened way earlier, but could be forced out of their native homes by other catastrophies. No one really knows who they were, there are theories, that they came from the black sea, others that they came from greece or spain (the excavation site we are talking here) It is definitely not 10.000 years but, given the timespan the memories of the Thera cathastrophy (which resembled Atlantis in many ways, due to being highly developed seafaring etc...) and the sea peoples invasion have been there in tales lingering around, while not being written down explicitely outside of egypt.
But a highly developed civilization which spanned lots of europe reigned out of the atlantic and that about 10.000 years ago, this is highly unlikely there must be proof one way or the other plastered all over the mediterrenean, and so far there is none. There are only a handful of sites somehow resembling what plato described but they are all dated sometime 1500BC when the bronze age culture was at its height and trade all over the mediterrenean was going on.
You obviously dont have a clue where the development is heading, with webgl and the html5 canvas you have a pretty powerful tool at hands to deliver a good gaming experience in a browser. Also constant connections for multiplayer gaming is no problem anymore thanks to websockets. WebCL is in the works as well.
Well you overlook something in your statement, you wont necessarily have to play on maximum settings. The consoles have stalled the development at least to the degree that the console level is the bare minimum which by then is a low range pc card (not from Intel) so you have the choice, you can operate on a budget and never change the graphics card and ram until the next console cycle and you still will have better graphics than on the console, or you can work your way along the bleeding edge then you are in the upgrade mill. I personally chose the first option and still have a better graphics experience than the consoles can offer but the entire upgrade cost me just 150 bucks 2 years ago.
Actually the cheaper argument is moot if you count in the price difference in pc and console games. And face it the ultimately needed upgrade cycle nowadays is as fast as the console upgrade cycle, and giving the shitty console processors usually the graphics card is the only part updated on the pc for about 10 years now. (Which means a pc bought 3-4 years ago will last until the next gen consoles hit the shelves and even then it is very likely that you only have to change the graphics card. Add to that about 20 USD dollars prices difference and a faster bargain bin period than on the consoles, than the price argument is non existent. Consoles simply follow the razor model by ripping you off afterwards big time.
Guess what there hasnt been any need to upgrade the pc since the last console generation has hit the shelves, the consoles brought the necessary pc upgrade cycle to a grinding halt. I bought an el cheapo 150 USD graphics card 2 years ago and still can play every game coming out for the pc in max or medium details.
Actually you are not so far off, we got a coplaint last year by a customer who was seriously complaining that a site was freaking out on his ie 5.5. I first thought this was a joke, but the guy was dead serious!
SD Card slot will happen sometime, but dont expect too much, apple has limited the SD Card usage in its adapter kit big time, all it does is to read in your digicam pics. As for the USB port which one do you want, standard usb female, you have it mostly but no target disk mode. Read my lips, this will never happen in apple land to allow a universal target disk mode due to apples fear of jailbreaking. If you want it go for android, Android has target disk mode out of the box.
As for plug in your usb device. Also unlikely same as on android since there is no driver infrastructure yet to support such things. Both would be nice, because one thing the ipad severely lacks for instance is a mechanism to plug in game controllers. (Jailbroken you can use blutooth and the wiimote for emulators)
Actually I live in Austria and we have had this law as long as I can remember... dunno about the other countries, I suspected it was the same everywhere in western europe. Not that people really bother to carry an id around.
Every EU country has a law which enforces to carry an ID it always has been like it and I am 40. If people really do is another issue. It has been about 24 years since a policement stopped me and controlled my id on the streets, and that was because I was drinking and just turned 16 (which is the legal age for drinking here) So the chances of being controlled just for the sake of having to show your id is pretty slim here unless you dont have the average european caucasian look and even if they catch you then the worst which can happen is a small fine.
wanted to get a second one and retire my current one to my wife. But I will wait another half a year to see if the rumours are true that the ipad3 will come before christmas and will have a retina display. I figured a retina display would be bigger than getting front cams now, because I do a lot of reading on the ipad, and getting a bigger resolution can help out in that area a lot.
Actually guess it is a matter of what series you chose, I have a T410 here provided by a customer, and this is one of the best built machines I have had my hands on for years, I would rate it more solid than my by now trusted macbook pro (which I would rate second) Guess like most other manufacturers Lenovo runs a high quality line inherited from IBM and probably still done by the same designers and a cheapo line where things fall apart after looking at them for several years.
It is the same with Acer, Dell, and even Apple with their entry macbooks but there the distinction is made more clear.
too much thermal paste is a huge problem and it has happened in the past with Apple products several times. Result overheating machines, graphic problems etc... It will be interesting if this is a serial issue as well here like it was with the first gen unibody macbook pros and the first gen macbook air and some other apple series. And if it is how long again it will take apple to acnowledge the problem or if they try to keep it under the rug like they did with the first gen macbook air, and then quietly shove out a fixing series leaving the old users hanging dry in the air. Face it apple can build solid machines but they often also build lemons and the changes of being left hanging dry in the air are huge!
Not only the first gen macbooks had improperly applied thermal past, the first gen macbook airs also among other things. The improperly applied thermal paste is a constant problem plaguing apple machines pretty much ever second year. I dont know why the problem repeats itself every second year, by now even the lowest support drone should be aware of those issues, and those guys who control the manufacturing output also. And I second that advice, never buy any first gen revision of a macbook always wait for the second one and even then wait another couple of months.
I guess so to, or the Stockholm syndrome is applied at full force. Build quality problems have been there in the past. And it always was a random luck if apple fixed it on the machines or not. Most of the time Apple acnowledged it only after they have been dragged to court with a class action lawsuit. If that did not happen users were left hanging dry in the air. Been there done that, first gen macbook air, constantly overheating if you did more than websurfing. A problem which according to apple never existed and yet there were thousands of complaints and they rolled out a fixup model half a year later which fixed exactly this issue! But no the problem does not exist and we wont fix it for you, thank you for your 2500 Euros!
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Actually the four mistakes Motorola did here in europe
a) Lock down the milestone and
b) Do not push out bugfix updates in a timely manner, usually if at all months behind the US by that frustrate the non geek crowd
c) Lock the bootloader to the general public so that the users cannot fix the firmware themselves and what
Fourth mistake
d) Tell your own european users who rightfully ask for an open bootloader so that they can fix the shoddy firmware themselves to make a hike
and go buy somewhere else (this has happened more than once over here)
In other words, Motorolas arrogance shot them out of the market, and not just the geek market!
Actually that is just my first hands experience here with the Milestone. A year ago everyone recommended it, but as soon as the people recognized they are not getting bugfix updates or are getting them months behind the USA and as soon as the geek percentage realized the sideway of custom roms also was blocked it straight went into the do not buy list for many. And I have seen more than a handful of negative recommendations regarding Motorola here.
If anything could have been done wrong with the Milestone it went wrong and Motorola single handedly gave away a potential 800 Mio markets. So to say, the Milestone was Motorolas second chance over here, they blew it big time and actually you now can see a lot of people running around with Android phones but not a single one using a Motorola anymore (it used to be different a year ago)
I live in europe so this is my first hands experience, yours might differ.
Motorola still is listed in the various phone telco lists, but no one really buys their phones anymore.
Actually in Europe the word of mouth regarding the Motorola shennanigans regarding the bootloader spread pretty quickly.
Add to that that Motorola Europe basically treated their customers like second class citizens regarding updates on the Milestones
and a bunch of if you dont like the bootloader buy somewhere else comments by the official support over here for the
following year, and you can see a scheme where the general public became overly frustrated and Motorola quickly
went from the only decent Android phone available directly straight to the do not buy list in the general public.
Yes the general public does not care about locked bootloaders, but it starts to care if they have a buggy firmware
and no possibility for a software update and if you ask the manufacturer you are told, it is either our way or the highway.
So basically whatever Motorola could do wrongly they did and it pays off for them negatively. The Milestone never became
more than a mediocre success due to the bad rep it got immediately, and the following models bombed literally.
I dont think if anyone from Motorola USA is reading this, but they defintiely should do, they just lost a market of
800 Mio people!
Im Europe Motorola phones are mostly dead no one is buying them anymore because of the bootloader shennanigans.
The US seems to be way dumber.
Depends on the transitions are very smooth in the 3d gallery of stock android, to bad that most phones use their own gallery instead of the 3d one which is absolutely superior to anything else on any platform, the ios gallery is a joke compared to the android one.
Well the problem here is that western europe can be seen as the closest and only realy friends the US has, if they betray event them, then who else is left?
On the other hand, the US has a history of broken contracts and promises just ask the US indians, while in Europe a contract is something which has to be fulfilled.
Not sure if the US was bargaining on this when the lobbied for the contract.
Actually there is a shitload of very innovative games in the independend scene, but Angry Birds is not one of them.
And yes he is right to a big degree the innovation happens in the independend scene currently where people push out games like Braid, De Blob, Amnesia, Minecraft, The Ball and others.
The problem simply is that this comes from the mouth of someone who has a very good game out which deservedly is highly successful, but on the originiality scale it is a rehash of some game ideas of the 80s and 90s.
Actually Angry Birds gameplay stems even back to the first computer games, does anyone of you guys still remember one of the first multiplayer games where two players where behind their own castle and the entire gameplay evolved around hitting the other player. There were myriads of variants of this gameplay, one being single player with different levels the other one being multiplayer with two players etc...
There is no general source, and in fact various places are identified of the origin of the atlantis myth. The highest possibility is Thera/Santorini which comes closest, the site the article talks about is also a bronze age civilisation in spain which also fell around the mid bronze age.
Also there is a handful of other mediterenneaen civilisations which would be candidates.
What I would exclude is the flooding of the mediterranean basin and the black sea, that had been too long before Platos time to give anything meaningful anymore.
But given the lack of resources on the Egyptian side and they have documented a lot of their works in stone, it is very likely that Plato made everything up and no Atlantis legend was existent anymore in his time, but some other legends around Thera and the sea people might have been still floating around in Egyptian records.
Actually Thera before the eruption had a circular like harbor structure, when thera was blasted off the ground by the eruption the area was unpassable by ships thanks to the volcanic output for quite some time.
Also Thera was one of the highest developed civilizations of its time (they even had a water toilet and multi floored buildings)
so at least the memory regarding Thera could be related to Plato. I also dont believe Atlantis as such ever existed, but there are several occasions in history which could ultimately have lead to such a legend in Platos time.
The probably by then in legend unforgotton explosion of Thera probably was one such event, the sea peoples invasion of the southeastern mediterrenean also was another such occasion.
Actually yes , it is most likely, but there might be some truth behind it nevertheless. There was a big invasion of the eastern mediterranean sea by of what the egyptians called the sea peoples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples, it was a mass migration combined with an invasion which brought several highly developed bronze age cultures to a downfall and Egypt on the brink of collapse.
No one really knows who those people were, but they are a fact conserved in letters and writings of that period.
They are definitely not survivors of the Thera desaster that happened way earlier, but could be forced out of their native homes by other catastrophies.
No one really knows who they were, there are theories, that they came from the black sea, others that they came from greece or spain (the excavation site we are talking here)
It is definitely not 10.000 years but, given the timespan the memories of the Thera cathastrophy (which resembled Atlantis in many ways, due to being highly developed seafaring etc...) and the sea peoples invasion have been there in tales lingering around, while not being written down explicitely outside of egypt.
But a highly developed civilization which spanned lots of europe reigned out of the atlantic and that about 10.000 years ago, this is highly unlikely there must be proof one way or the other plastered all over the mediterrenean, and so far there is none. There are only a handful of sites somehow resembling what plato described but they are all dated sometime 1500BC when the bronze age culture was at its height and trade all over the mediterrenean was going on.
You obviously dont have a clue where the development is heading, with webgl and the html5 canvas you have a pretty powerful tool at hands to deliver a good gaming experience in a browser.
Also constant connections for multiplayer gaming is no problem anymore thanks to websockets.
WebCL is in the works as well.
Well you overlook something in your statement, you wont necessarily have to play on maximum settings. The consoles have stalled the development at least to the degree that the console level is the bare minimum which by then is a low range pc card (not from Intel)
so you have the choice, you can operate on a budget and never change the graphics card and ram until the next console cycle and you still will have better graphics than on the console, or you can work your way along the bleeding edge then you are in the upgrade mill. I personally chose the first option and still have a better graphics experience than the consoles can offer but the entire upgrade cost me just 150 bucks 2 years ago.
Actually the cheaper argument is moot if you count in the price difference in pc and console games. And face it the ultimately needed upgrade cycle nowadays is as fast as the console upgrade cycle, and giving the shitty console processors usually the graphics card is the only part updated on the pc for about 10 years now.
(Which means a pc bought 3-4 years ago will last until the next gen consoles hit the shelves and even then it is very likely that you only have to change the graphics card. Add to that about 20 USD dollars prices difference and a faster bargain bin period than on the consoles, than the price argument is non existent. Consoles simply follow the razor model by ripping you off afterwards big time.
Guess what there hasnt been any need to upgrade the pc since the last console generation has hit the shelves, the consoles brought the necessary pc upgrade cycle to a grinding halt. I bought an el cheapo 150 USD graphics card 2 years ago and still can play every game coming out for the pc in max or medium details.
More a case of a person who thinks the Internet hasnto adjust to his personality not vice versa.
Actually you are not so far off, we got a coplaint last year by a customer who was seriously complaining that a site was freaking out on his ie 5.5.
I first thought this was a joke, but the guy was dead serious!
SD Card slot will happen sometime, but dont expect too much, apple has limited the SD Card usage in its adapter kit big time, all it does is to read in your digicam pics. As for the USB port which one do you want, standard usb female, you have it mostly but no target disk mode. Read my lips, this will never happen in apple land to allow a universal target disk mode due to apples fear of jailbreaking. If you want it go for android, Android has target disk mode out of the box.
As for plug in your usb device. Also unlikely same as on android since there is no driver infrastructure yet to support such things. Both would be nice, because one thing the ipad severely lacks for instance is a mechanism to plug in game controllers.
(Jailbroken you can use blutooth and the wiimote for emulators)
Actually I live in Austria and we have had this law as long as I can remember... dunno about the other countries, I suspected it was the same everywhere in western europe. Not that people really bother to carry an id around.
Every EU country has a law which enforces to carry an ID it always has been like it and I am 40. If people really do is another issue.
It has been about 24 years since a policement stopped me and controlled my id on the streets, and that was because I was drinking and just turned 16 (which is the legal age for drinking here)
So the chances of being controlled just for the sake of having to show your id is pretty slim here unless you dont have the average european caucasian look and even if they catch you then the worst which can happen is a small fine.
wanted to get a second one and retire my current one to my wife. But I will wait another half a year to see if the rumours are true that the ipad3 will come before christmas and will have a retina display. I figured a retina display would be bigger than getting front cams now, because I do a lot of reading on the ipad, and getting a bigger resolution can help out in that area a lot.
Actually guess it is a matter of what series you chose, I have a T410 here provided by a customer, and this is one of the best built machines I have had my hands on for years, I would rate it more solid than my by now trusted macbook pro (which I would rate second)
Guess like most other manufacturers Lenovo runs a high quality line inherited from IBM and probably still done by the same designers and a cheapo line where things fall apart after looking at them for several years.
It is the same with Acer, Dell, and even Apple with their entry macbooks but there the distinction is made more clear.
too much thermal paste is a huge problem and it has happened in the past with Apple products several times. Result
overheating machines, graphic problems etc...
It will be interesting if this is a serial issue as well here like it was with the first gen unibody macbook pros and the first gen macbook air and some other apple series.
And if it is how long again it will take apple to acnowledge the problem or if they try to keep it under the rug like they did with the first gen macbook air, and then quietly shove out a fixing series leaving the old users hanging dry in the air.
Face it apple can build solid machines but they often also build lemons and the changes of being left hanging dry in the air are huge!
Not only the first gen macbooks had improperly applied thermal past, the first gen macbook airs also among other things.
The improperly applied thermal paste is a constant problem plaguing apple machines pretty much ever second year. I dont know why the problem repeats itself every second year, by now even the lowest support drone should be aware of those issues, and those guys who control the manufacturing output also.
And I second that advice, never buy any first gen revision of a macbook always wait for the second one and even then wait another couple of months.
I guess so to, or the Stockholm syndrome is applied at full force. Build quality problems have been there in the past.
And it always was a random luck if apple fixed it on the machines or not. Most of the time Apple acnowledged it only after they have been dragged to court with a class action lawsuit. If that did not happen users were left hanging dry in the air.
Been there done that, first gen macbook air, constantly overheating if you did more than websurfing.
A problem which according to apple never existed and yet there were thousands of complaints and they rolled out a fixup model half a year later which fixed exactly this issue!
But no the problem does not exist and we wont fix it for you, thank you for your 2500 Euros!