Also if people truly do just want a system to run homebrew on why not just buy the dev kit? It's basically an unlocked, unsubsidized PS3.
Because they place roughly the same requirements on buyers as Nintendo does. Buying a PS3 devkit isn't something you can just buy off eBay.
Remember: They don't make unlocked versions of devices because they absolutely do not want you doing what you want with your device. This is true for almost every iOS/Android/WP7/Console made.
Make no mistake, Android is better than the other, closed alternatives. I'm just annoyed that Google came out trumpeting how open they were, yet they expressed NIH syndrome to a ridiculous extent and reimplemented the wheel almost completely.
Google comes along and gives you a platform that is completely open, gives it away for free. Do whatever the hell you want to do with it.
The end result is a nasty OS you have to root, that isn't compatible with anything else in the Linux world without a ton of hacking, code spread everywhere that doesn't go upstream (and except for the kernel, has no real upstream last I checked.)
I would give Google more credit if they had leveraged the efforts that were already under way even if it meant totally ignoring things like OpenMoko, rather how MeeGo is banking on the upstream heavily. But deliberately ignoring all the work that was out there for what appears solely to have been to retain exclusive control over the platform (to no great effect) and holding releases for major hardware vendors instead of being fully open about it just disappoints me with how they trumped up their release back in 2008.
So again, unless things change the mobile space goes where Microsoft, Apple, and Google decide.
Not all of it. A fair number of bits were still closed source, and this irritated a lot of the user base.
MeeGo corrects pretty much all of that, as well as pushing to and pulling from upstream projects heavily. It is, to a great degree, what Maemo should have been.
It's too bad Google couldn't have pushed for that ages go, instead of reinventing the wheel.
Google did a bang up job kneecapping open source efforts in the mobile space, convincing the community to chase after an environment that discarded pretty much every existing open source tool in the name of NIH and withholds new versions from the community until their partners are done getting their releases out with it.
Then they sit back and have the nerve to tell us that Android is "open" while users are forced to jailbreak and deal with vendors that try to cripple devices so they can leverage later versions as a selling point for the next carrier contract.
I hope that MeeGo takes off with non-asshole hardware vendors, if not the we might as well right off the mobile computing space as being property of Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Military wants the high ground, and in terms of Earth-focused warfare the most you need is LEO. Lunar puts you 3 days out at Apollo speeds, and at the bottom of a gravity well (even if it is significantly weaker.) LEO puts you over any potential target every 90 minutes and less than a day away from resupply.
Until you've got strategically valuable positions in space between the Earth and Moon, the Moon itself will hold no value militarily.
They aren't stable enough to rely on here on earth
Entirely the fault of sloppy vendors and low quality, poorly tested drivers that aren't in the Kernel. You could dodge all of those issues if you simply didn't use Android and all of Google's custom stuff and instead used a minimalist distribution that used the heavily-hammered-on libraries you see used in production Linux systems.
no where near 'hard' enough to be out of our atmosphere's protection.
This is the first thing that came to my mind. Ultrafine lithography makes transistors easy to mess with, especially in RAM and Flash.
Reading the secondary link, instead of the one linked to in the article, says something different:
This has nothing to do with Slingbox which, as I understand, is not a service provided by a 3rd party but a device and software you use and set up yourself. The Nikkei article linked reads as follows:
Japan Broadcasting Corp. and five Tokyo-based local TV broadcasting firms sued computer company Nagano Shoten, demanding the firm's service be terminated for copyright violation and seeking damages.
So a 3rd party firm was effectively redistributing the broadcasts and charging for the service. While I don't believe this should be a problem (charging for routing of free to broadcast programming including the advertising,) I can see where the problem comes in.
Services like Slingbox are likely immune as they are effectively a private circuit. I suspect that Sony sells both ends of the streaming hardware to end-users and said device was not the subject of this suit.
I know, like labor and environmental protections. The problem isn't that Michigan priced themselves out of business, it's that places like China treat people like shit and crack down on people who oppose such abuses. Logically, the only way to compete with China would be to reduce costs down to being just under China costs + shipping.
Of course, I doubt many people in the US would be willing to accept such a drop in quality of life, or accept such corporate abuse.
Because companies that insist on TiVOizing shit would have stayed away. Remember that Motorola bought their own Linux-based OS vendor. Nothing's come of it, but I'm sure they were hedging their bets.
Sure, but that's no excuse for what Motorola is doing. They could deliver precisely that experience without this type of control. The only purpose of this is to allow them to use the next version of Android as a selling point for the next hardware, and to FORCE the issue.
And this apathy is what they're all banking on. They can tighten down the screws and leverage the masses an excuse to do so. This is true for Microsoft, Apple, Motorola, and every vendor that forces you to root.
They want to do this to PCs, and I expect the push and attack on standard, uncrippled PCs to step up in the next few years. It's far more profitable that way.
This is not locking down Android, this is locking down a Motorola Handset.
To a great degree it is locking down Android, as you cannot upgrade to a new version of Android that requires a new kernel, not to mention that this could easily be extended to defeat pretty much any permanent root process.
This is why I'm sticking with my N900 until I see where these shitty companies fall out. At this rate I'll never buy Motorola hardware, and supposedly Samsung is rolling out something similar in Galaxy Tab devices (though only reported in Europe so far.)
Holy cow that article is written from ignorance. Never put it past a business rag to get technical details entirely wrong.
However not all changes are UI related; it is reported that Apple is due to add an ARM Cortex A8 processor to its iPhone 5.
Holy shit they're stupid. The A4 processor IS a Cortex-A8. I suppose Apple can be blamed for their stupid marketing garbage, though.
Also, Engadget reported that the next edition of iPad and iPhone will run on A9 multi-core chips designed by Qualcomm.
Goddamnit, no. Qualcomm does not use the ARM designed Cortex cores.
Apple Insider reported that the SGX543 is designed to parallel as many as 16 cores together thus the developers do not have to rewrite the apps to optimize multiple-cores.
Apparently the author of this article is just throwing around words, instead of being aware that there's a difference between the actual processor core and the on-die GPU core.
Basically, this article is filled with flawed writing based on the author's almost total ignorance of the subject. They know just enough, however, to be completely and totally wrong.
Not to say this rumor is true, but this is why forced vendor dependence is a bad thing. I'm not sure if Samsung is doing it (and they aren't yet, as I understand it) but if Samsung was doing what Motorola was and signing the kernel, then such fixes and updates would be impossible to install.
As it stands, you can root a Samsung device and load whatever ROM you want on it. But beware, this is the sort of behavior that they want such lock down for. Not for your security, but to deliberately limit the lifespan of your device and make you buy a new one.
The fact is that a full BIOS + Linux / Windows system is a horrible fucking mess of bloat
It's also a huge pile of capability that wasn't around 20 years ago. I find it hard to believe that, capability-wise, your Acorn A3000 was on par with a modern PC. I don't see it as bloat, but as the necessary result of supporting a wide array of capabilities (not necessarily hardware) and an extremely capable and platform-independent environment.
BIOSes (especially RAID) are the slowest part these days, and UEFI is hopefully going to combat that.
They cannot arguably be capable of defining what actions being taken with an EC2 instance are and are not crimes, therefore they should not even attempt to do so. It is not, after all, their duty to do so.
They can refuse service to those who they feel are suspicious, or cut people off if they violate some generic ToS, but surreptitiously cutting in because they think someone is committing a crime (and cracking WPA is not a crime), only runs them the risk of false positives.
More importantly, if they really feel they are observing someone committing a crime using their service, they should stand back and report it to authorities, who (in varying degrees of accuracy) are charged with being capable of determining if a crime is taking place and have the authority to intercede.
The iPhone app store is locked down. If that is a problem for you, then don't use it.
If the App Store Only" mentality of locked down devices persists, eventually there won't be something else to choose so that we "don't [have to] use it."
Slashdot Mirror
The irony and hypocrisy here is thick.
Well, when Amazon decides to delete a book you aren't supposed to have, the people with the physical copy will still have it.
They've done it before, I have no doubt they'll do it again at some point.
Because they place roughly the same requirements on buyers as Nintendo does. Buying a PS3 devkit isn't something you can just buy off eBay.
Remember: They don't make unlocked versions of devices because they absolutely do not want you doing what you want with your device. This is true for almost every iOS/Android/WP7/Console made.
MCE, which has long been a bone of contention. dsme was closed until they moved all the juicy bits out into MCE.
There's a listing of all the infrastructure bits that are closed:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Open_development/Why_the_closed_packages
None of this is an issue in MeeGo aside from BME (annoyingly) and the 3D drivers.
Make no mistake, Android is better than the other, closed alternatives. I'm just annoyed that Google came out trumpeting how open they were, yet they expressed NIH syndrome to a ridiculous extent and reimplemented the wheel almost completely.
The end result is a nasty OS you have to root, that isn't compatible with anything else in the Linux world without a ton of hacking, code spread everywhere that doesn't go upstream (and except for the kernel, has no real upstream last I checked.)
I would give Google more credit if they had leveraged the efforts that were already under way even if it meant totally ignoring things like OpenMoko, rather how MeeGo is banking on the upstream heavily. But deliberately ignoring all the work that was out there for what appears solely to have been to retain exclusive control over the platform (to no great effect) and holding releases for major hardware vendors instead of being fully open about it just disappoints me with how they trumped up their release back in 2008.
So again, unless things change the mobile space goes where Microsoft, Apple, and Google decide.
Not all of it. A fair number of bits were still closed source, and this irritated a lot of the user base.
MeeGo corrects pretty much all of that, as well as pushing to and pulling from upstream projects heavily. It is, to a great degree, what Maemo should have been.
It's too bad Google couldn't have pushed for that ages go, instead of reinventing the wheel.
Google did a bang up job kneecapping open source efforts in the mobile space, convincing the community to chase after an environment that discarded pretty much every existing open source tool in the name of NIH and withholds new versions from the community until their partners are done getting their releases out with it.
Then they sit back and have the nerve to tell us that Android is "open" while users are forced to jailbreak and deal with vendors that try to cripple devices so they can leverage later versions as a selling point for the next carrier contract.
I hope that MeeGo takes off with non-asshole hardware vendors, if not the we might as well right off the mobile computing space as being property of Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Except that the TSA has already expressed a desire to add scanners and pat downs to things like bus routes, ships, and rail.
The TSA will not stop with their power grab until the agency is destroyed.
Low Earth Orbit? Yes!
Military wants the high ground, and in terms of Earth-focused warfare the most you need is LEO. Lunar puts you 3 days out at Apollo speeds, and at the bottom of a gravity well (even if it is significantly weaker.) LEO puts you over any potential target every 90 minutes and less than a day away from resupply.
Until you've got strategically valuable positions in space between the Earth and Moon, the Moon itself will hold no value militarily.
Nope. Just hitting preview shows that it removes all non-ASCII characters regardless of how many or where they are.
So it looks great, but still has terrible flaws.
The Web 2.0 nerds put to work on Slashdot finally vomited all over the main page. It is now a steaming pile of slow AJAX!
Yes this is offtopic. Sosumi.
Entirely the fault of sloppy vendors and low quality, poorly tested drivers that aren't in the Kernel. You could dodge all of those issues if you simply didn't use Android and all of Google's custom stuff and instead used a minimalist distribution that used the heavily-hammered-on libraries you see used in production Linux systems.
This is the first thing that came to my mind. Ultrafine lithography makes transistors easy to mess with, especially in RAM and Flash.
Reading the secondary link, instead of the one linked to in the article, says something different:
This has nothing to do with Slingbox which, as I understand, is not a service provided by a 3rd party but a device and software you use and set up yourself. The Nikkei article linked reads as follows:
So a 3rd party firm was effectively redistributing the broadcasts and charging for the service. While I don't believe this should be a problem (charging for routing of free to broadcast programming including the advertising,) I can see where the problem comes in.
Services like Slingbox are likely immune as they are effectively a private circuit. I suspect that Sony sells both ends of the streaming hardware to end-users and said device was not the subject of this suit.
I know, like labor and environmental protections. The problem isn't that Michigan priced themselves out of business, it's that places like China treat people like shit and crack down on people who oppose such abuses. Logically, the only way to compete with China would be to reduce costs down to being just under China costs + shipping.
Of course, I doubt many people in the US would be willing to accept such a drop in quality of life, or accept such corporate abuse.
Because companies that insist on TiVOizing shit would have stayed away. Remember that Motorola bought their own Linux-based OS vendor. Nothing's come of it, but I'm sure they were hedging their bets.
Sure, but that's no excuse for what Motorola is doing. They could deliver precisely that experience without this type of control. The only purpose of this is to allow them to use the next version of Android as a selling point for the next hardware, and to FORCE the issue.
And this apathy is what they're all banking on. They can tighten down the screws and leverage the masses an excuse to do so. This is true for Microsoft, Apple, Motorola, and every vendor that forces you to root.
They want to do this to PCs, and I expect the push and attack on standard, uncrippled PCs to step up in the next few years. It's far more profitable that way.
To a great degree it is locking down Android, as you cannot upgrade to a new version of Android that requires a new kernel, not to mention that this could easily be extended to defeat pretty much any permanent root process.
This is why I'm sticking with my N900 until I see where these shitty companies fall out. At this rate I'll never buy Motorola hardware, and supposedly Samsung is rolling out something similar in Galaxy Tab devices (though only reported in Europe so far.)
The way people bitch about "bloat," that'd probably a smart thing to do.
Yes, the N900.
And the Palm Pre.
And the Motorola DROID, Droid X, DROID 2, and DROID PRO.
iPhone 3Gs, iPad, iPhone 4, iPods, and Apple TV.
Pretty much every non-Qualcomm based phone currently runs on Cortex-A8 based CPUs.
Holy cow that article is written from ignorance. Never put it past a business rag to get technical details entirely wrong.
Holy shit they're stupid. The A4 processor IS a Cortex-A8. I suppose Apple can be blamed for their stupid marketing garbage, though.
Goddamnit, no. Qualcomm does not use the ARM designed Cortex cores.
Apparently the author of this article is just throwing around words, instead of being aware that there's a difference between the actual processor core and the on-die GPU core.
Basically, this article is filled with flawed writing based on the author's almost total ignorance of the subject. They know just enough, however, to be completely and totally wrong.
Not to say this rumor is true, but this is why forced vendor dependence is a bad thing. I'm not sure if Samsung is doing it (and they aren't yet, as I understand it) but if Samsung was doing what Motorola was and signing the kernel, then such fixes and updates would be impossible to install.
As it stands, you can root a Samsung device and load whatever ROM you want on it. But beware, this is the sort of behavior that they want such lock down for. Not for your security, but to deliberately limit the lifespan of your device and make you buy a new one.
The fact is that a full BIOS + Linux / Windows system is a horrible fucking mess of bloat
It's also a huge pile of capability that wasn't around 20 years ago. I find it hard to believe that, capability-wise, your Acorn A3000 was on par with a modern PC. I don't see it as bloat, but as the necessary result of supporting a wide array of capabilities (not necessarily hardware) and an extremely capable and platform-independent environment.
BIOSes (especially RAID) are the slowest part these days, and UEFI is hopefully going to combat that.
They cannot arguably be capable of defining what actions being taken with an EC2 instance are and are not crimes, therefore they should not even attempt to do so. It is not, after all, their duty to do so.
They can refuse service to those who they feel are suspicious, or cut people off if they violate some generic ToS, but surreptitiously cutting in because they think someone is committing a crime (and cracking WPA is not a crime), only runs them the risk of false positives.
More importantly, if they really feel they are observing someone committing a crime using their service, they should stand back and report it to authorities, who (in varying degrees of accuracy) are charged with being capable of determining if a crime is taking place and have the authority to intercede.
The iPhone app store is locked down. If that is a problem for you, then don't use it.
If the App Store Only" mentality of locked down devices persists, eventually there won't be something else to choose so that we "don't [have to] use it."