From what i understand, the Apple App Store does a pretty good job of promoting the good apps and making it easy to find what you're looking for. The Android App Store on the other hand is a total mess. The promotion system is so-so, the categories are rather broad, and the actual search system is very primitive. If you don't know the exact name of the app you're looking for to use as a search term it can be very hit or miss.
So perhaps what Google needs is better organization and searching for the App Store, rather than new and better apps. Perhaps they could hire some kind of company that specializes in search engines to improve their app store for them?
Multi-stage installations aren't all that unusual, but it's interesting that the first stage says:
"The LibreOffice 3.3 installation files will be unpacked and saved in the folder shown below. If you would like to save LibreOffice to a different folder, click 'Browse' to select another folder."
but when you click "browse" the new window says:
"Select the folder to install LibreOffice 3.3 in:"
When i saw that i had to go back and double-check that it was indeed an unpacking and not the actual installation. It may seem like a minor quibble, but this is the first thing new users are going to encounter, you should try to put your best foot forward by making the installation clear and precise. (Also the actual folder browsing was painfully slow, but that might have just been due to the peculiarities of this computer. It always locks up windows explorer for 20-30 seconds whenever you try to access "My Computer".)
And of course i still think the name is dumb, but i can't really think of a better one myself. Hopefully they'll eventually be able to buy back the "Open Office" name from Oracle. Perhaps we should try to convince Oracle that a branded "Oracle Office" would be much better for them for brand recognition purposes (since clearly they don't believe in open software) and therefore they don't need the old name anymore?
I don't know about the MPAA or the others, but i know the whole point of the ESRB was that it was a voluntary measure the video game industry took on itself in order to avoid something like the Comic Book Code getting created by an outside group. So it's not external censorship and it's really kind of weird to put it up as an example of the Comic Book Code's "cousin" living on. It's really a good example of the _right_ way to inform consumer about what's in the content they're consuming without being subject to censorship.
"I love the new changes - give me as much space as possible for the website, let the browser get the hell out of the way. Tabs on top and no status bar shave off pixels that can be used for the website, the actual content."
Okay, i can understand the argument you're making here. I disagree with it; i feel that sacrificing what is in my opinion good UI in order to add a few pixels to the website view is being penny wise, pound foolish. However you're entitled to your own opinion. (If you're interested, i prefer economizing on how much i have to move my mouse, and i switch between doing stuff in the window to clicking on tabs a lot more than i switch between doing stuff in the window and doing anything with the URL/Navigation toolbar.)
However, tabs on top does NOT actually save any pixels. In fact i've installed the beta on a virtual machine, and i just went and checked. Switching from tabs on bottom to tabs on tab actually _subtracts_ two or three pixels from the viewable area. It's kind of dumb, but it's true. And even if it was designed properly i can't see why tabs on top would inherently be any better than tabs on bottom in terms of vertical pixels. Getting rid of the status bar, yes, getting rid of the menu bar yes, but just reordering existing elements? I don't see it.
And it wasn't that long ago that someone was considered unelectable as president if they were a Catholic. The Catholic church has never been that popular in America due to our Protestant founders.
Bill Gates, Glenn Beck, the Pope, or the Dalai Lama? What were my other choices again? As a liberal atheist if that's all i've got to choose from i'd go with either Bill Gates or the Dalai Lama too, and i've been boycotting the XBox ever since the first model came out, despite being an avid gamer.
I haven't read TFA, so i wouldn't be surprised if those weren't the only options, but from my perspective at least that's a pretty weird selection to choose for comparison.
They've figured out a new way to reorder the 5 step plan!
Step 1: ???
Step 2: We may have no idea what to do, but a tiny little company that's way too small to sue us made a successful game!
Step 3: Copy their idea.
Step 4: Profit!
Step 5: Act remorseful when the similarities are inevitably discovered.
Perhaps it's just because i'm not in the crowd Apple is aiming for, but i really wish my Android phone had _more_ buttons, not less, and i wish they were physical buttons rather than the damn stupid software buttons.
It's nice that i can turn the volume up and down without waking my phone up, but if there were actual physical buttons then other functions could be mapped to those buttons for use when the screen was locked/off. I could even get by with just one working remapable button (though more would be better of course) which i would map to "next track" when using the music app and to "go back 30 seconds" when using Audible's app. Both of those are functions that i frequently want to do while driving but are made awkward by the need to wake the phone up and unlock it in order to enable the soft buttons, while keeping my eyes on the road at the same time. Switching from a dedicated mp3 player with physical buttons to a phone was definitely a case of two steps forward, one step back.
Er, what? The only heavily promoted non-mobile phone Android devices have been the Galaxy Tab and the Barnes & Noble Nook, and those have done quite well. And this is before the "real" tablet version of the Android OS has been released. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that a significant number of people actually involved in the business consider Android to be failing in that regard?
As a consumer, do i care? As long as some companies are making some profit there will continue to be Android phones for me to buy. As long as the total number of Android phones being sold continues to exceed the number of iPhones then Google has every reason to keep on developing the OS.
Apple will continue to make huge profits selling a smaller number of phones at a marked up price. That's great for Apple, but i'm not exactly sure what's in it for the rest of us.
Er, are you trolling, or have you been drinking some kind of kool-aid? Did 2012 even mention global warming as any kind of cause?
Let's pretend for the moment that it did. I generally believe that global climate change, aka global warming, is a real possibility. But the stuff that happened in 2012 was ludicrous no matter what causes you ascribed to it. One could just as easily argue "Avatar took place on another planet, and other planets exist, therefore Avatar is realistic" or "Tron took place inside a computer, and computers exist, therefore Tron is realistic."
Re:The original was incredibly frustrating
on
Tron: Legacy
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· Score: 1
"They've got uploading someone into a computer, and obviously teleportation... and all they could do with it was make a video game."
Either you're very confused about the first movie or i am. My recollection is "They've got some video games, and all they could do with it was make a teleportation machine."
More specifically, Flynn creates some video games. Dillinger steals those video games. Dillinger leveraged those video games into either the creation or take-over of a multi-billion dollar corporation. (That bit seems a bit of a stretch.) That corporation financed (presumably among many other things) research into disassembly and reassembly of physical objects, aka teleportation.
"I don't know what you're talking about, because I've never seen anyone use 'resources' as a rationale for deleting an article."
No one uses "resources" as a reason why an individual article should be deleted. They use "resources" as a reason why articles need to be deleted in general. (Certainly not the only reason, as you point out "quality" is another one.)
"The idea is that no article at all is better than an article that has no systematic way of ever becoming factually correct."
I've encountered multiple articles about subjects i'm interested in that were easily verifiable and yet were deleted as being "non notable" or some such. It's happened enough times that i'm certainly not interested in donating.
On the one hand you're (somewhat) unfairly maligning EA. They've published some pretty good games lately. I don't know offhand if they actually _made_ any of those good games, but that's fine. The last thing we want to do is _encourage_ the "this company made a good game so we'll buy them out and make the sequels ourselves" mindset.
On the other hand, you're being way too optimistic about single player games that "only have 20 hours of game play." From what i've been seeing in reviews there's a whole crop of games this year that have single player timeframes in the 5-10 hour range (and i believe that's across the entire industry, not any one publisher in particular.) It's sparked a lot of discussion on the podcasts i listen to about the whole cost vs quality vs length debate.
Personally i'm certainly willing to pay more for a good short game than i am for a bad long game (cf. the usual Portal argument) but i'd also probably be willing to pay more for a longer good game than for a shorter good game.
Freedom of speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want, it does not mean that anyone else has to listen to you, and of course it doesn't meant that anyone else has to agree with you. And it definitely doesn't mean that anyone else has to actually provide anything to you in order to allow you to broadcast your speech.
If a member of some crazy cult knocks on your door and demands that he be able to stand on your front lawn and scream the tenants of his religion at your neighbor, "freedom of speech" does not require you to say yes. Amazon is in a somewhat trickier spot since they're in business providing a service, however if they were open to any legal action it would probably be for discrimination, not for violating Wikileaks' freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech only protects you from censorship by the government. It doesn't protect you from censorship by anyone else.
"My "Freedom of Speech" if Mine, given by my creator, to use as I see fit! If you dont like it you can try to take it from me. Then again I also have a right to use guns and to shoot your ass for trying."
If you really want to deconstruct it that much, then in terms of what i was given by my creator i've got "Freedom To Do Whatever The Fuck I Want", to use as i see fit! If you don't like it you can try to take it from me. Of course i might shoot your ass for trying. Or i might just shoot your ass for not trying, cause i've got "Freedom TO Do Whatever The Fuck I Want"!
The way you described games is pretty much applicable to the other types of apps you listed. I would be amazed if even half of the non-game apps on my iPad or iPhone are available for Android. The only category that I'm aware of where Android is pretty close to iOS in this regard is music streaming apps, and even there it lags, but it at least has most of the main ones that come to mind.
I'd certainly be interested to see a list of what you consider to be key non-game apps, but i guess there was kind of an underlying assumption that i didn't bother to clarify in my post. Unless you are migrating from one system to another, no one really cares which particular productivity app they use, they only care if it does its job well. I don't care how awesome the Mac proprietary office suite is, OpenOffice works fine for me on my PC. I know my old fitness app had both iPhone and Android versions. When they started requiring access to contact info because they wanted to integrate with Facebook i switched to a different app, and i don't care if this new app is on the iPhone or not, it does what i want it to do.
But stereotypes aside, gaming is a much more social activity. I'm sure there was an "Angry Birds" clone on Android long before the real thing came over. It could even have been just as good as the original game in its own way. But everyone was still eager to pick up the real Angry Birds game when it was available because they wanted to play the same game everyone else was talking about. They wanted to talk to their friends about it, or beat their friends' scores, or were just curious to see what the buzz was about, or whatever. No one (okay, almost no one =) runs up to their friends shouting "i just found this amazing new spreadsheet program on my phone! You have to try it out!"
For any kind of productivity app all that's needed is functional parity. For games or social apps however everyone is going to want whatever the cool new thing is. And for the moment at least the iPhone has the lion's share of the cool new things. Particularly with games, since games are so much harder to port/simultaneously develop than the social apps are.
"As much as it pains us to say, Apple has done those things very well while the Android market has floundered helplessly. So count my vote for Apple, because at the end of the day I want to get my work done, not just play around with a shiny toy."
I think you just made an, um, bad analogy. The Android market has tons of productivity apps. It has tons of shopping apps. It has tons of fitness apps. The only kinds of apps it's seriously lacking in right now are games. And it actually does have a lot of games, it's just missing a lot of the high profile games that have become popular on iPhone. If you want to be playing "Game Dev Story" or "Cut the Rope" or "Super Mega Worm" or the latest Squenix game then you need to have an iPhone (for now at least.) If you're okay with fun but not as popular games then you can have just as good a time with Android.
So the iPhone is what you want if you just want to play around with a shiny toy. If you just want to get your work done then either will do.
The TSA is NOT the "last line of defense". The last line of defense will be the other passengers on the flight.
Yeah... I know a few Air Marshals that might disagree with that statement. The training they put these guys through is ridiculous.
The Air Marshals are the last line of defense, not the passengers? So in the event of a terrorist attack during a flight you think any Air Marshals on board will just sit back and let the passengers see if they can handle it first before they get involved? Either you have a poor understanding of what "last line of defense" means, or you have a poor opinion of Air Marshals.
"What would those extra buttons do? I don't think the use of the extra buttons on Android and WP7 are that much of an advantage"
Generally the same thing as the Android buttons do, because they _are_ incredibly useful? Unless an app designer has totally screwed something up i can always get to settings easily by using the menu button. I can always jump back to the desktop using the homescreen, or switch apps by holding it down. A back button is certainly useful as well (wasn't there recently an article on slashdot about how back was the most used button in browsers?) The search button is probably the least necessary since most apps where you need to search already have a text box available for that, but i still use the button as a shortcut a lot.
I wonder if the buttons are the kind of thing you don't realize how useful they are until you've had them and then try to go without them? I've tried to use my girlfriend's iPod Touch from time to time and found navigating about incredibly frustrating, but she had no problem migrating from the iPod Touch to Android.
And if you want to complain about the second link, note that an Oligopoly is just a point on the asymptotic slide towards a Monopoly. Gobbling up competitors becomes more difficult as they become larger and the benefits of gaining a monopoly decrease as the the number of competitors decrease, at least as long as those competitors are amenable to a little group price-fixing.
Even so, given enough time and the lack of any outside intervention, eventually oligopolies will collapse into a monopoly state. One by one each company will _eventually_ make a mistake large enough to make it a good takeover prospect, or companies will come up with good reasons to merge.
Would Google be doing all of this if not for concerns about Bing and such? Competition is normally good, but despite what they claim in my experience Google Instant really seems to slow down my searches. I'm not convinced this will be a real improvement either. Of course everyone seems to think Chrome is great too but it just seems painfully slow to me, so maybe i've just been having bad luck with Google products lately.
I grew up in Seattle where, once upon a time you actually waited until you had a "walk" signal before crossing the street (though not so much anymore judging by what i've seen on recent visits home, insert "get off my lawn" comment here.) Thus it males me really frustrated when i get to the intersection near work in SoCal and find someone else standing next to the post with the button for the crosswalk signal and i assume they must have already pushed it. But then the light changes, the "walk" signal doesn't come on, and they just cross the intersection anyways while i am forced by habit to wait until the next cycle. I'm trying to train myself to elbow my way to the button and press it just to be sure, but as a generally non-confrontational person it's not something that comes naturally.
Slashdot Mirror
From what i understand, the Apple App Store does a pretty good job of promoting the good apps and making it easy to find what you're looking for. The Android App Store on the other hand is a total mess. The promotion system is so-so, the categories are rather broad, and the actual search system is very primitive. If you don't know the exact name of the app you're looking for to use as a search term it can be very hit or miss.
So perhaps what Google needs is better organization and searching for the App Store, rather than new and better apps. Perhaps they could hire some kind of company that specializes in search engines to improve their app store for them?
Multi-stage installations aren't all that unusual, but it's interesting that the first stage says:
"The LibreOffice 3.3 installation files will be unpacked and saved in the folder shown below. If you would like to save LibreOffice to a different folder, click 'Browse' to select another folder."
but when you click "browse" the new window says:
"Select the folder to install LibreOffice 3.3 in:"
When i saw that i had to go back and double-check that it was indeed an unpacking and not the actual installation. It may seem like a minor quibble, but this is the first thing new users are going to encounter, you should try to put your best foot forward by making the installation clear and precise. (Also the actual folder browsing was painfully slow, but that might have just been due to the peculiarities of this computer. It always locks up windows explorer for 20-30 seconds whenever you try to access "My Computer".)
And of course i still think the name is dumb, but i can't really think of a better one myself. Hopefully they'll eventually be able to buy back the "Open Office" name from Oracle. Perhaps we should try to convince Oracle that a branded "Oracle Office" would be much better for them for brand recognition purposes (since clearly they don't believe in open software) and therefore they don't need the old name anymore?
I don't know about the MPAA or the others, but i know the whole point of the ESRB was that it was a voluntary measure the video game industry took on itself in order to avoid something like the Comic Book Code getting created by an outside group. So it's not external censorship and it's really kind of weird to put it up as an example of the Comic Book Code's "cousin" living on. It's really a good example of the _right_ way to inform consumer about what's in the content they're consuming without being subject to censorship.
"I love the new changes - give me as much space as possible for the website, let the browser get the hell out of the way. Tabs on top and no status bar shave off pixels that can be used for the website, the actual content."
Okay, i can understand the argument you're making here. I disagree with it; i feel that sacrificing what is in my opinion good UI in order to add a few pixels to the website view is being penny wise, pound foolish. However you're entitled to your own opinion. (If you're interested, i prefer economizing on how much i have to move my mouse, and i switch between doing stuff in the window to clicking on tabs a lot more than i switch between doing stuff in the window and doing anything with the URL/Navigation toolbar.)
However, tabs on top does NOT actually save any pixels. In fact i've installed the beta on a virtual machine, and i just went and checked. Switching from tabs on bottom to tabs on tab actually _subtracts_ two or three pixels from the viewable area. It's kind of dumb, but it's true. And even if it was designed properly i can't see why tabs on top would inherently be any better than tabs on bottom in terms of vertical pixels. Getting rid of the status bar, yes, getting rid of the menu bar yes, but just reordering existing elements? I don't see it.
And it wasn't that long ago that someone was considered unelectable as president if they were a Catholic. The Catholic church has never been that popular in America due to our Protestant founders.
Bill Gates, Glenn Beck, the Pope, or the Dalai Lama? What were my other choices again? As a liberal atheist if that's all i've got to choose from i'd go with either Bill Gates or the Dalai Lama too, and i've been boycotting the XBox ever since the first model came out, despite being an avid gamer.
I haven't read TFA, so i wouldn't be surprised if those weren't the only options, but from my perspective at least that's a pretty weird selection to choose for comparison.
Personally i think i'll stick with products from Aladdin or Hired Girl.
They've figured out a new way to reorder the 5 step plan!
Step 1: ???
Step 2: We may have no idea what to do, but a tiny little company that's way too small to sue us made a successful game!
Step 3: Copy their idea.
Step 4: Profit!
Step 5: Act remorseful when the similarities are inevitably discovered.
Perhaps it's just because i'm not in the crowd Apple is aiming for, but i really wish my Android phone had _more_ buttons, not less, and i wish they were physical buttons rather than the damn stupid software buttons.
It's nice that i can turn the volume up and down without waking my phone up, but if there were actual physical buttons then other functions could be mapped to those buttons for use when the screen was locked/off. I could even get by with just one working remapable button (though more would be better of course) which i would map to "next track" when using the music app and to "go back 30 seconds" when using Audible's app. Both of those are functions that i frequently want to do while driving but are made awkward by the need to wake the phone up and unlock it in order to enable the soft buttons, while keeping my eyes on the road at the same time. Switching from a dedicated mp3 player with physical buttons to a phone was definitely a case of two steps forward, one step back.
Er, what? The only heavily promoted non-mobile phone Android devices have been the Galaxy Tab and the Barnes & Noble Nook, and those have done quite well. And this is before the "real" tablet version of the Android OS has been released. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that a significant number of people actually involved in the business consider Android to be failing in that regard?
As a consumer, do i care? As long as some companies are making some profit there will continue to be Android phones for me to buy. As long as the total number of Android phones being sold continues to exceed the number of iPhones then Google has every reason to keep on developing the OS.
Apple will continue to make huge profits selling a smaller number of phones at a marked up price. That's great for Apple, but i'm not exactly sure what's in it for the rest of us.
Er, are you trolling, or have you been drinking some kind of kool-aid? Did 2012 even mention global warming as any kind of cause?
Let's pretend for the moment that it did. I generally believe that global climate change, aka global warming, is a real possibility. But the stuff that happened in 2012 was ludicrous no matter what causes you ascribed to it. One could just as easily argue "Avatar took place on another planet, and other planets exist, therefore Avatar is realistic" or "Tron took place inside a computer, and computers exist, therefore Tron is realistic."
"They've got uploading someone into a computer, and obviously teleportation... and all they could do with it was make a video game."
Either you're very confused about the first movie or i am. My recollection is "They've got some video games, and all they could do with it was make a teleportation machine."
More specifically, Flynn creates some video games. Dillinger steals those video games. Dillinger leveraged those video games into either the creation or take-over of a multi-billion dollar corporation. (That bit seems a bit of a stretch.) That corporation financed (presumably among many other things) research into disassembly and reassembly of physical objects, aka teleportation.
"I don't know what you're talking about, because I've never seen anyone use 'resources' as a rationale for deleting an article."
No one uses "resources" as a reason why an individual article should be deleted. They use "resources" as a reason why articles need to be deleted in general. (Certainly not the only reason, as you point out "quality" is another one.)
"The idea is that no article at all is better than an article that has no systematic way of ever becoming factually correct."
I've encountered multiple articles about subjects i'm interested in that were easily verifiable and yet were deleted as being "non notable" or some such. It's happened enough times that i'm certainly not interested in donating.
On the one hand you're (somewhat) unfairly maligning EA. They've published some pretty good games lately. I don't know offhand if they actually _made_ any of those good games, but that's fine. The last thing we want to do is _encourage_ the "this company made a good game so we'll buy them out and make the sequels ourselves" mindset.
On the other hand, you're being way too optimistic about single player games that "only have 20 hours of game play." From what i've been seeing in reviews there's a whole crop of games this year that have single player timeframes in the 5-10 hour range (and i believe that's across the entire industry, not any one publisher in particular.) It's sparked a lot of discussion on the podcasts i listen to about the whole cost vs quality vs length debate.
Personally i'm certainly willing to pay more for a good short game than i am for a bad long game (cf. the usual Portal argument) but i'd also probably be willing to pay more for a longer good game than for a shorter good game.
Freedom of speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want, it does not mean that anyone else has to listen to you, and of course it doesn't meant that anyone else has to agree with you. And it definitely doesn't mean that anyone else has to actually provide anything to you in order to allow you to broadcast your speech.
If a member of some crazy cult knocks on your door and demands that he be able to stand on your front lawn and scream the tenants of his religion at your neighbor, "freedom of speech" does not require you to say yes. Amazon is in a somewhat trickier spot since they're in business providing a service, however if they were open to any legal action it would probably be for discrimination, not for violating Wikileaks' freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech only protects you from censorship by the government. It doesn't protect you from censorship by anyone else.
"My "Freedom of Speech" if Mine, given by my creator, to use as I see fit! If you dont like it you can try to take it from me. Then again I also have a right to use guns and to shoot your ass for trying."
If you really want to deconstruct it that much, then in terms of what i was given by my creator i've got "Freedom To Do Whatever The Fuck I Want", to use as i see fit! If you don't like it you can try to take it from me. Of course i might shoot your ass for trying. Or i might just shoot your ass for not trying, cause i've got "Freedom TO Do Whatever The Fuck I Want"!
"Claims made about the future were wrong"
Actually, the accusation is that the claims aren't even wrong.
The way you described games is pretty much applicable to the other types of apps you listed. I would be amazed if even half of the non-game apps on my iPad or iPhone are available for Android. The only category that I'm aware of where Android is pretty close to iOS in this regard is music streaming apps, and even there it lags, but it at least has most of the main ones that come to mind.
I'd certainly be interested to see a list of what you consider to be key non-game apps, but i guess there was kind of an underlying assumption that i didn't bother to clarify in my post. Unless you are migrating from one system to another, no one really cares which particular productivity app they use, they only care if it does its job well. I don't care how awesome the Mac proprietary office suite is, OpenOffice works fine for me on my PC. I know my old fitness app had both iPhone and Android versions. When they started requiring access to contact info because they wanted to integrate with Facebook i switched to a different app, and i don't care if this new app is on the iPhone or not, it does what i want it to do.
But stereotypes aside, gaming is a much more social activity. I'm sure there was an "Angry Birds" clone on Android long before the real thing came over. It could even have been just as good as the original game in its own way. But everyone was still eager to pick up the real Angry Birds game when it was available because they wanted to play the same game everyone else was talking about. They wanted to talk to their friends about it, or beat their friends' scores, or were just curious to see what the buzz was about, or whatever. No one (okay, almost no one =) runs up to their friends shouting "i just found this amazing new spreadsheet program on my phone! You have to try it out!"
For any kind of productivity app all that's needed is functional parity. For games or social apps however everyone is going to want whatever the cool new thing is. And for the moment at least the iPhone has the lion's share of the cool new things. Particularly with games, since games are so much harder to port/simultaneously develop than the social apps are.
"As much as it pains us to say, Apple has done those things very well while the Android market has floundered helplessly. So count my vote for Apple, because at the end of the day I want to get my work done, not just play around with a shiny toy."
I think you just made an, um, bad analogy. The Android market has tons of productivity apps. It has tons of shopping apps. It has tons of fitness apps. The only kinds of apps it's seriously lacking in right now are games. And it actually does have a lot of games, it's just missing a lot of the high profile games that have become popular on iPhone. If you want to be playing "Game Dev Story" or "Cut the Rope" or "Super Mega Worm" or the latest Squenix game then you need to have an iPhone (for now at least.) If you're okay with fun but not as popular games then you can have just as good a time with Android.
So the iPhone is what you want if you just want to play around with a shiny toy. If you just want to get your work done then either will do.
The TSA is NOT the "last line of defense". The last line of defense will be the other passengers on the flight.
Yeah... I know a few Air Marshals that might disagree with that statement. The training they put these guys through is ridiculous.
The Air Marshals are the last line of defense, not the passengers? So in the event of a terrorist attack during a flight you think any Air Marshals on board will just sit back and let the passengers see if they can handle it first before they get involved? Either you have a poor understanding of what "last line of defense" means, or you have a poor opinion of Air Marshals.
"What would those extra buttons do? I don't think the use of the extra buttons on Android and WP7 are that much of an advantage"
Generally the same thing as the Android buttons do, because they _are_ incredibly useful? Unless an app designer has totally screwed something up i can always get to settings easily by using the menu button. I can always jump back to the desktop using the homescreen, or switch apps by holding it down. A back button is certainly useful as well (wasn't there recently an article on slashdot about how back was the most used button in browsers?) The search button is probably the least necessary since most apps where you need to search already have a text box available for that, but i still use the button as a shortcut a lot.
I wonder if the buttons are the kind of thing you don't realize how useful they are until you've had them and then try to go without them? I've tried to use my girlfriend's iPod Touch from time to time and found navigating about incredibly frustrating, but she had no problem migrating from the iPod Touch to Android.
You wanted some examples?
And if you want to complain about the second link, note that an Oligopoly is just a point on the asymptotic slide towards a Monopoly. Gobbling up competitors becomes more difficult as they become larger and the benefits of gaining a monopoly decrease as the the number of competitors decrease, at least as long as those competitors are amenable to a little group price-fixing.
Even so, given enough time and the lack of any outside intervention, eventually oligopolies will collapse into a monopoly state. One by one each company will _eventually_ make a mistake large enough to make it a good takeover prospect, or companies will come up with good reasons to merge.
Would Google be doing all of this if not for concerns about Bing and such? Competition is normally good, but despite what they claim in my experience Google Instant really seems to slow down my searches. I'm not convinced this will be a real improvement either. Of course everyone seems to think Chrome is great too but it just seems painfully slow to me, so maybe i've just been having bad luck with Google products lately.
So how many young men who haven't settled down yet are looking at this more as an opportunity than a problem? :)
I grew up in Seattle where, once upon a time you actually waited until you had a "walk" signal before crossing the street (though not so much anymore judging by what i've seen on recent visits home, insert "get off my lawn" comment here.) Thus it males me really frustrated when i get to the intersection near work in SoCal and find someone else standing next to the post with the button for the crosswalk signal and i assume they must have already pushed it. But then the light changes, the "walk" signal doesn't come on, and they just cross the intersection anyways while i am forced by habit to wait until the next cycle. I'm trying to train myself to elbow my way to the button and press it just to be sure, but as a generally non-confrontational person it's not something that comes naturally.