I was having this debate with someone the other night who believes that in 3 - 5 years every phone will be android. Personally I was arguing that Blackberry in the business world is pretty hard to beat and the iPhone has a sizable lead. But people tend to trade in their personal phones every couple years. Businesses usually get married to a platform and it's harder to move them away. Especially if they have invested in any applications.
I know Apple gets flamed a lot around here by people for not being open enough and forcing developers to release apps through the app store, but I've seen it as an attempt to delay and try to prevent malware on the iPhone. Personally that's one reason why I am uncool in the geek world and don't jailbreak mine. I know I've bitched about the bluetooth stack being locked down on the iPhone. I'd love to connect a freaking wireless keyboard to it sometimes. But at the same time, I see Apple's position on controlling the gateway beyond them "being evil locking people in".
You have the people harping on how cool Android will be because one won't "be locked into one app store" etc.. But in the back of my mind that just increases the risk of someone downloading some "Cool free app" that happens to be a malware app. It only has to happen a few times before the reputation gets out there. And it will happen because people see pops ups now that say, "Hey you have mal ware, down load our malware cleaner." And then they click and install nothing but malware.
And I think it is much more likely given how I've seen people use their phones on such a spur of a moment basis. The number of times I've seen people just be browsing and buy/download a ringtone or app on the spur of the moment. Especially if they are at a club and have already had a few to drink and aren't thinking. (I have to take away certain people's iphones when we go out to keep them from doing anything stupid).
Either way, I dread the day that we have to run anti-virus on our phones.
It also makes me think there are still reasons to keep the trusty old land line around.
You take away nukes and you will see an increase in the use of Bio-chemical weapons on the battlefield. What do you think kept Saddam's stockpiles of mustard gas out of use during the first gulf war in 1991?
*hint* it wasn't overwhelming conventional forces.
If possible, make two copies of the work or work(s). Get a manilla envelope, put the pictures in them, go to the post office and mail them to yourself. Then take the sealed envelope and put it somewhere safe. Then if you need proof of date, the postmark becomes proof of date. Just don't open the envelope until you get to court.
We've always done the same thing for patent registrations. We always mail a copy to our selves and keep at a safe deposit box.
But I believe you can register a CD or DVD with copyrighted images. So however many images you can place on a DVD I believe would cost $35 per DVD.
Waste of economic resources that could have been spent elsewhere. Want an example? Last year we had money left in the bank where I work. If the employees took anymore home in pay, it would have bumped us up a tax bracket and we would have made less after taxes. So what were our options?
A) We could retain earnings, watch 50% of it go to the government in the form of corporate income tax. B) We could donate to a local charity, such as the food bank or Good Samaritan House. C) We could put up Solar Panels to cut our utility bills and free up cash flow.
We chose C. We saw a slight uptick in business from the environmental who saw us as going "green" and how great that was for everyone. Maybe Michael Gecko was right: "Greed is good." Because we didn't do it to be green. We did it to be greedy and save money.
Now let's say 25 years from now, Global Warming turns out to be nothing more than a lot of hot air from enviromentalists. We've spent Billions (or Trillions) of dollars on green technologies. Great. But if Global Warming turns out to just be hot air and nothing more, what else could we have done with those Billions or Trillions? Feed the homeless? Provide universal heath-care? Funded a cure for AIDs and the common cold? What was the opportunity cost?
Sorry if I take global warming with a grain of salt. I remember being a kid an the wackos coming to my school, telling us kids how bad McDonalds was for using styrofoam containers because they weren't "Bio-degradable". Then McDonalds switches to wax paper, which is just as bad if not worse.
I honestly believe that Global Warming has more to do with natural cycles than what we've done. Have we aided and abetted? Yeah, probably. But what no body seems to be saying is that we're on course for another major Ice age because:
A) Some of the climatologist are right and the global temperature spikes just before an ice age. B) Enough polar ice melts to affect the ocean's salinity and the Atlantic Conveyor breaks down.
My Dad lives out in Lake St. Louis. He's stuck with his choice of CenturyTel and Charter. A few years ago he had Charter Telephone service, but no cable or high-speed internet. The calls were crystal clear and even the dial up had a better connection back in the day. Two years ago he switched to a CenturyTel bundle, but their DSL service was horribly slow. It was so bad that in when I was at his house for Christmas, my 3G speeds on my iPhone was faster than his DSL connection.
So he switched to Charter for TV/Internet/Phone service. Now they use a VOIP box instead of whatever system they had before. The quality sucks. If two people try to talk at the same time, one can't hear the other. Back in the late 1990's, he used a service called dialpad.com to make calls from dial up to my grandmother for free. Well, he had the same problems back then if two people tried to talk at once. Here we are 10 years later, much higher bandwidth, and the same damn problem. A problem he didn't have when he used their service before!
Cool app, but where are the android users? We've been looking at mobile smartphone development for our products and android isn't a blip on the radar. Our big internal debate was whether to support blackberry or iPhone first. Why? We're in a college town. The demographic we're targeting either have an iPhone or a Blackberry. And it is surprisingly evenly split. We have yet to see a single Android phone in the wild.
Linux lost me on the desktop 8 years ago when OSX came out. Most of the "switchers" I knew didn't go from windows to Mac in those days, they went from Linux to Mac. Especially developers. With OSX, we had our unix stack for *AMP development plus something Linux didn't: commercial applications. The fact we could still run MS Office, Photoshop, and other such programs made it easy to switch. Plus the hardware just worked. There were no driver issues, especially with laptops, etc..
When computers stopped being something I toyed with on the side to my main source of income, my priority shifted because my time became worth something. I no longer had time to try to recompile a driver for my sound card 6 different ways depending on the Linux Flavour of the moment. In fact, I found Linux to be annoying as hell because it's a kernel, not an operating system. All the different distros but libraries and such in different directories based on whatever their reasonings were. So if you were working on a Redhat box one day and tried to test on a debain or slackware box the next, nothing would work.
That's why I left the Linux world for FreeBSD on the server side and the reason why I dumped both Windows and Linux desktop for MacOSX back in 2001.
What the Linux community still doesn't understand is that it's all about the apps. Now with Intel Macs, I run XP via parallels. I have one 24" iMac sitting on my desk that does it all. (I'm still using my older 12.1" powerbook as my laptop).
Last year when we were first starting up this operation, we bought barebones machines and slapped linux on them for developers. After, they were more than enough to run Eclipse for Java development. Well they all got frustrated with this or that and ended up bringing in XP discs and installing on their machines. (Which was a problem for a variety of reasons). So we replaced the barebones boxes with MacMinis that came with parallels and a copy of XP pro already installed. Everyone's been a lot happier.
You piss off enough intelligence agencies (or just piss off Putin) and eventually they'll come gunning for you with real bullets. Getting raided by police is one thing. Once domain registers start having a rash of bad accidents, or more overtly, wind up dead in front of their homes with small caliber bullet holes to the back of the head, the ball game changes.
We have a back up server the hosting company provides, and that is on a seperate subnet, no external facing ip. In addtion, we have an FTP server at another hosting co, and finally the emergancy back up in the office, which gets backed up to an external hdd and DVD.
That last part with the dancing robots and such, I half expected to see a "To be continued..." with the Terminator trailer directly following....
I thought the first 90 minutes of the episode was fantastic. Even the Baltar speech was good. His character went full circle. But the last 40 minutes. There were a lot of just endings.
It was an ending, but it honestly felt half empty.
Any country with an active sigint program is snooping international internet traffic coming through their pipes. After all, that is the job of an intelligence agency. Only questions are to what degree and sophistication. Oh, and here's a list of countries with SIGINT programme.
They went up for "public safety" here. Then they started loosing money because they worked. People stopped running red lights. Instead of screaming what a great "victory" for "public safety", the town council started bitching about the lack of revenue. So much so, that a few cops started manning the control boxes and making the yellow lights change much faster than normal to make people run red lights. At least until the State Highway department caught the cops doing it on tape. (irony I know)
We see it a lot when we put out notice to the CS department for internships. Last fall I interviewed about 20 candidates for 5 internship positions. We ended up filling two of those because that was all that we could find to work with. Most thought they could work 4 - 6 weeks on a project and because it was web based, that in 3 months it would be worth a billion dollars. A few thought they were coding experts. I remember one that have lectured me on how we were doomed to failure because we weren't using cloud computing and Ruby on Rails. And they knew that RoR was going to be the future (this was a couple years ago). We were and still are using vanilla PHP. The impression I got over and over again was the kids were looking towards what might be in a few months or years in terms of technology. Part of that is academia. They were more worried about using XYZ technology because that was "cool" or the "in" thing at the time on all the development blogs.
They lacked the experience and understanding that there are reasons why it is called "bleeding edge".
The two students that we did hire as interns were different than the others. One was a non-traditional student. Had a wife and 3-year old and trying to get this bachelors at 22. He needed a senior project and his only caveat was he would like to use Python. The reason being that was what he was using at work on a daily basis to create reports. We could work with him on that front and we did. We knew that time was a factor for him and there was no great reason not to use python.
The other had a 17 hour course load and kept a part-time job at McDonalds. Well long story short, he didn't work for McDonalds. He got the job done. By the summer, he was working for us part-time and now works full-time with us at a salary that made most of his peers jealous. And I'll be the first to admit, he may not be the best programmer on the planet from a talent point of view. But he gets the job done, is flexible, and works until he figures it out. I'd take five of him if I could find them.
But as the grandparent said, that's the current management. In five or ten years when this management team retires or are replaced with a new crop of MBA's that play from the Havard MBA playbook, i.e. how can I make the most money in the next x number of quarters so I get my bonuses no matter what it does to the long term health of the company, it may be a different story.
Red Hat is a public traded company. Eventually it will surcome to the will of the investors who have a stake in the company. And many of those shareholders will give to flips about opensource. What they want to see is how well you make your profit forecast for next quarter.
One of my best friends from college fits the profile. She was a top ranked student in microbiology, went on for masters and phd in something related to DNA profilig. Got married, had kids, and decided to stay at home
We have an online shopping cart system that renders correct in most browsers even going back to MSIE 5. We have a lot of users still browsing the site with IE 6 because of where they work and their lack of ability to install anything else. Still 70%+ of the traffic is MSIE. It renders fine on all platforms with Opera, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome. Even works on most cell phones with a javascript enabled browser including LG phones, Opera Mini, Blackberrys with 4.7 or greater installed, Blackberry storm, android, and of course the iPhone.
But MSIE 8.....the div with the "Add to cart" button doesn't even render. In MSIE 7 compatibility mode, it renders, but it splits the div into two elements on separate sides of the page for no reason that I can find. I am considering redirecting MSIE 8 users to page that says:
"Due to incompatibilities Microsoft creating in MSIE 8, we are unable to support your browser type. Our website will work with previous versions of MSIE or any standards compliant browser such as firefox, opera, safari, or chrome. We recommend you switch to one of these browsers for improved browsing of the internet."
We bought Acer Aspire One's for our over winter break interns. They completed their projects and got to keep the devices for the start of the spring semester. And they all love them. One had their laptop crash and burn (HDD failed) and while he didn't like the 8.9" screen at first, as it turns out the netbook had the same speed processor, more ram, and better video card than the laptop he was using plus a webcam.
Quickly, they started taking their netbooks to class because they were just easier to carry, fit into any bag they were carrying without the need to lug around a back pack and a laptop bag.
When I develop anymore, I have my 12.1" Powerbook on the left and an Aspire One on the right. And if you look at the specs, my Powerbook is only 1.5Ghz G4 with 1.25 Ghz of Ram, 80GB HDD, the Aspire one is 1.6Ghz, 1GB of ram, and 120GB HDD. So I can write code and develop websites on the Mac in BBedit and then open them up on the Netbook to see how they'll look on MSIE.
However, for most people, they are used to popping in a disc or double clicking an icon that says "install". That's it. Believe me, the fact that one drags and drops most applications on a Mac boggles people minds. That's why I think we've seen more applications come with installers on OSX even if all the installer does is just copy the.app to the application directory.
Now there are GUI front ends to APT or Ports (if you're a BSD user like myself), and dare I say I find the command line easier for such tasks. One of the reasons I favored BSD over Linux back in the day was the fact I could go/usr/ports/whatever make install clean and then go grab a cup a coffee or watch TV while it fetched the needed packages and dependancies, compiled and it worked.
Because to date, the only android phone I see is powered by T-mobile. T-mobile isn't even offered in this area. People keep speaking about how great Android will be. The problem is the "will be" part. The iPhone is here today, works, and has some 12 million users. If in two years someone has a better offering powered by Android, I'll look at it.
We've been looking at mobile platforms to develop for, and our top two is Blackberry and iPhone. We had to make sure our sites and apps worked on those two platforms. At this point, android isn't even a blip on the radar.
The problem with Android is the all the talk about what it will be. It maybe nice, but by the time we start seeing a number of phones with the platform, we'll be seeing the 3rd generation iPhone, maybe 4th. And Blackberry isn't standing still.
Slashdot Mirror
I was having this debate with someone the other night who believes that in 3 - 5 years every phone will be android. Personally I was arguing that Blackberry in the business world is pretty hard to beat and the iPhone has a sizable lead. But people tend to trade in their personal phones every couple years. Businesses usually get married to a platform and it's harder to move them away. Especially if they have invested in any applications.
I know Apple gets flamed a lot around here by people for not being open enough and forcing developers to release apps through the app store, but I've seen it as an attempt to delay and try to prevent malware on the iPhone. Personally that's one reason why I am uncool in the geek world and don't jailbreak mine. I know I've bitched about the bluetooth stack being locked down on the iPhone. I'd love to connect a freaking wireless keyboard to it sometimes. But at the same time, I see Apple's position on controlling the gateway beyond them "being evil locking people in".
You have the people harping on how cool Android will be because one won't "be locked into one app store" etc.. But in the back of my mind that just increases the risk of someone downloading some "Cool free app" that happens to be a malware app. It only has to happen a few times before the reputation gets out there. And it will happen because people see pops ups now that say, "Hey you have mal ware, down load our malware cleaner." And then they click and install nothing but malware.
And I think it is much more likely given how I've seen people use their phones on such a spur of a moment basis. The number of times I've seen people just be browsing and buy/download a ringtone or app on the spur of the moment. Especially if they are at a club and have already had a few to drink and aren't thinking. (I have to take away certain people's iphones when we go out to keep them from doing anything stupid).
Either way, I dread the day that we have to run anti-virus on our phones.
It also makes me think there are still reasons to keep the trusty old land line around.
You take away nukes and you will see an increase in the use of Bio-chemical weapons on the battlefield. What do you think kept Saddam's stockpiles of mustard gas out of use during the first gulf war in 1991?
*hint* it wasn't overwhelming conventional forces.
If possible, make two copies of the work or work(s). Get a manilla envelope, put the pictures in them, go to the post office and mail them to yourself. Then take the sealed envelope and put it somewhere safe. Then if you need proof of date, the postmark becomes proof of date. Just don't open the envelope until you get to court.
We've always done the same thing for patent registrations. We always mail a copy to our selves and keep at a safe deposit box.
But I believe you can register a CD or DVD with copyrighted images. So however many images you can place on a DVD I believe would cost $35 per DVD.
Right? Right?
Waste of economic resources that could have been spent elsewhere. Want an example? Last year we had money left in the bank where I work. If the employees took anymore home in pay, it would have bumped us up a tax bracket and we would have made less after taxes. So what were our options?
A) We could retain earnings, watch 50% of it go to the government in the form of corporate income tax.
B) We could donate to a local charity, such as the food bank or Good Samaritan House.
C) We could put up Solar Panels to cut our utility bills and free up cash flow.
We chose C. We saw a slight uptick in business from the environmental who saw us as going "green" and how great that was for everyone. Maybe Michael Gecko was right: "Greed is good." Because we didn't do it to be green. We did it to be greedy and save money.
Now let's say 25 years from now, Global Warming turns out to be nothing more than a lot of hot air from enviromentalists. We've spent Billions (or Trillions) of dollars on green technologies. Great. But if Global Warming turns out to just be hot air and nothing more, what else could we have done with those Billions or Trillions? Feed the homeless? Provide universal heath-care? Funded a cure for AIDs and the common cold? What was the opportunity cost?
Sorry if I take global warming with a grain of salt. I remember being a kid an the wackos coming to my school, telling us kids how bad McDonalds was for using styrofoam containers because they weren't "Bio-degradable". Then McDonalds switches to wax paper, which is just as bad if not worse.
I honestly believe that Global Warming has more to do with natural cycles than what we've done. Have we aided and abetted? Yeah, probably. But what no body seems to be saying is that we're on course for another major Ice age because:
A) Some of the climatologist are right and the global temperature spikes just before an ice age.
B) Enough polar ice melts to affect the ocean's salinity and the Atlantic Conveyor breaks down.
My Dad lives out in Lake St. Louis. He's stuck with his choice of CenturyTel and Charter. A few years ago he had Charter Telephone service, but no cable or high-speed internet. The calls were crystal clear and even the dial up had a better connection back in the day. Two years ago he switched to a CenturyTel bundle, but their DSL service was horribly slow. It was so bad that in when I was at his house for Christmas, my 3G speeds on my iPhone was faster than his DSL connection.
So he switched to Charter for TV/Internet/Phone service. Now they use a VOIP box instead of whatever system they had before. The quality sucks. If two people try to talk at the same time, one can't hear the other. Back in the late 1990's, he used a service called dialpad.com to make calls from dial up to my grandmother for free. Well, he had the same problems back then if two people tried to talk at once. Here we are 10 years later, much higher bandwidth, and the same damn problem. A problem he didn't have when he used their service before!
Cool app, but where are the android users? We've been looking at mobile smartphone development for our products and android isn't a blip on the radar. Our big internal debate was whether to support blackberry or iPhone first. Why? We're in a college town. The demographic we're targeting either have an iPhone or a Blackberry. And it is surprisingly evenly split. We have yet to see a single Android phone in the wild.
Linux lost me on the desktop 8 years ago when OSX came out. Most of the "switchers" I knew didn't go from windows to Mac in those days, they went from Linux to Mac. Especially developers. With OSX, we had our unix stack for *AMP development plus something Linux didn't: commercial applications. The fact we could still run MS Office, Photoshop, and other such programs made it easy to switch. Plus the hardware just worked. There were no driver issues, especially with laptops, etc..
When computers stopped being something I toyed with on the side to my main source of income, my priority shifted because my time became worth something. I no longer had time to try to recompile a driver for my sound card 6 different ways depending on the Linux Flavour of the moment. In fact, I found Linux to be annoying as hell because it's a kernel, not an operating system. All the different distros but libraries and such in different directories based on whatever their reasonings were. So if you were working on a Redhat box one day and tried to test on a debain or slackware box the next, nothing would work.
That's why I left the Linux world for FreeBSD on the server side and the reason why I dumped both Windows and Linux desktop for MacOSX back in 2001.
What the Linux community still doesn't understand is that it's all about the apps. Now with Intel Macs, I run XP via parallels. I have one 24" iMac sitting on my desk that does it all. (I'm still using my older 12.1" powerbook as my laptop).
Last year when we were first starting up this operation, we bought barebones machines and slapped linux on them for developers. After, they were more than enough to run Eclipse for Java development. Well they all got frustrated with this or that and ended up bringing in XP discs and installing on their machines. (Which was a problem for a variety of reasons). So we replaced the barebones boxes with MacMinis that came with parallels and a copy of XP pro already installed. Everyone's been a lot happier.
You piss off enough intelligence agencies (or just piss off Putin) and eventually they'll come gunning for you with real bullets. Getting raided by police is one thing. Once domain registers start having a rash of bad accidents, or more overtly, wind up dead in front of their homes with small caliber bullet holes to the back of the head, the ball game changes.
We have a back up server the hosting company provides, and that is on a seperate subnet, no external facing ip. In addtion, we have an FTP server at another hosting co, and finally the emergancy back up in the office, which gets backed up to an external hdd and DVD.
You can't run Linux, but you can run NetBSD:
http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/303/
That last part with the dancing robots and such, I half expected to see a "To be continued..." with the Terminator trailer directly following....
I thought the first 90 minutes of the episode was fantastic. Even the Baltar speech was good. His character went full circle. But the last 40 minutes. There were a lot of just endings.
It was an ending, but it honestly felt half empty.
Any country with an active sigint program is snooping international internet traffic coming through their pipes. After all, that is the job of an intelligence agency. Only questions are to what degree and sophistication. Oh, and here's a list of countries with SIGINT programme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGINT_by_Alliances,_Nations_and_Industries
They went up for "public safety" here. Then they started loosing money because they worked. People stopped running red lights. Instead of screaming what a great "victory" for "public safety", the town council started bitching about the lack of revenue. So much so, that a few cops started manning the control boxes and making the yellow lights change much faster than normal to make people run red lights. At least until the State Highway department caught the cops doing it on tape. (irony I know)
....starts supporting the PPC architecture on windows, and Apple supports the minority x86 from Intel....
I'm starting to think that just maybe 2012 IS the end of the world....
Maybe Freescale or Motorola or IBM?
We see it a lot when we put out notice to the CS department for internships. Last fall I interviewed about 20 candidates for 5 internship positions. We ended up filling two of those because that was all that we could find to work with. Most thought they could work 4 - 6 weeks on a project and because it was web based, that in 3 months it would be worth a billion dollars. A few thought they were coding experts. I remember one that have lectured me on how we were doomed to failure because we weren't using cloud computing and Ruby on Rails. And they knew that RoR was going to be the future (this was a couple years ago). We were and still are using vanilla PHP. The impression I got over and over again was the kids were looking towards what might be in a few months or years in terms of technology. Part of that is academia. They were more worried about using XYZ technology because that was "cool" or the "in" thing at the time on all the development blogs.
They lacked the experience and understanding that there are reasons why it is called "bleeding edge".
The two students that we did hire as interns were different than the others. One was a non-traditional student. Had a wife and 3-year old and trying to get this bachelors at 22. He needed a senior project and his only caveat was he would like to use Python. The reason being that was what he was using at work on a daily basis to create reports. We could work with him on that front and we did. We knew that time was a factor for him and there was no great reason not to use python.
The other had a 17 hour course load and kept a part-time job at McDonalds. Well long story short, he didn't work for McDonalds. He got the job done. By the summer, he was working for us part-time and now works full-time with us at a salary that made most of his peers jealous. And I'll be the first to admit, he may not be the best programmer on the planet from a talent point of view. But he gets the job done, is flexible, and works until he figures it out. I'd take five of him if I could find them.
But as the grandparent said, that's the current management. In five or ten years when this management team retires or are replaced with a new crop of MBA's that play from the Havard MBA playbook, i.e. how can I make the most money in the next x number of quarters so I get my bonuses no matter what it does to the long term health of the company, it may be a different story.
Red Hat is a public traded company. Eventually it will surcome to the will of the investors who have a stake in the company. And many of those shareholders will give to flips about opensource. What they want to see is how well you make your profit forecast for next quarter.
One of my best friends from college fits the profile. She was a top ranked student in microbiology, went on for masters and phd in something related to DNA profilig. Got married, had kids, and decided to stay at home
We have an online shopping cart system that renders correct in most browsers even going back to MSIE 5. We have a lot of users still browsing the site with IE 6 because of where they work and their lack of ability to install anything else. Still 70%+ of the traffic is MSIE. It renders fine on all platforms with Opera, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome. Even works on most cell phones with a javascript enabled browser including LG phones, Opera Mini, Blackberrys with 4.7 or greater installed, Blackberry storm, android, and of course the iPhone.
But MSIE 8.....the div with the "Add to cart" button doesn't even render. In MSIE 7 compatibility mode, it renders, but it splits the div into two elements on separate sides of the page for no reason that I can find. I am considering redirecting MSIE 8 users to page that says:
"Due to incompatibilities Microsoft creating in MSIE 8, we are unable to support your browser type. Our website will work with previous versions of MSIE or any standards compliant browser such as firefox, opera, safari, or chrome. We recommend you switch to one of these browsers for improved browsing of the internet."
Newer !== better
We bought Acer Aspire One's for our over winter break interns. They completed their projects and got to keep the devices for the start of the spring semester. And they all love them. One had their laptop crash and burn (HDD failed) and while he didn't like the 8.9" screen at first, as it turns out the netbook had the same speed processor, more ram, and better video card than the laptop he was using plus a webcam.
Quickly, they started taking their netbooks to class because they were just easier to carry, fit into any bag they were carrying without the need to lug around a back pack and a laptop bag.
When I develop anymore, I have my 12.1" Powerbook on the left and an Aspire One on the right. And if you look at the specs, my Powerbook is only 1.5Ghz G4 with 1.25 Ghz of Ram, 80GB HDD, the Aspire one is 1.6Ghz, 1GB of ram, and 120GB HDD. So I can write code and develop websites on the Mac in BBedit and then open them up on the Netbook to see how they'll look on MSIE.
However, for most people, they are used to popping in a disc or double clicking an icon that says "install". That's it. Believe me, the fact that one drags and drops most applications on a Mac boggles people minds. That's why I think we've seen more applications come with installers on OSX even if all the installer does is just copy the .app to the application directory.
Now there are GUI front ends to APT or Ports (if you're a BSD user like myself), and dare I say I find the command line easier for such tasks. One of the reasons I favored BSD over Linux back in the day was the fact I could go /usr/ports/whatever make install clean and then go grab a cup a coffee or watch TV while it fetched the needed packages and dependancies, compiled and it worked.
Because to date, the only android phone I see is powered by T-mobile. T-mobile isn't even offered in this area. People keep speaking about how great Android will be. The problem is the "will be" part. The iPhone is here today, works, and has some 12 million users. If in two years someone has a better offering powered by Android, I'll look at it.
We've been looking at mobile platforms to develop for, and our top two is Blackberry and iPhone. We had to make sure our sites and apps worked on those two platforms. At this point, android isn't even a blip on the radar.
The problem with Android is the all the talk about what it will be. It maybe nice, but by the time we start seeing a number of phones with the platform, we'll be seeing the 3rd generation iPhone, maybe 4th. And Blackberry isn't standing still.