This is MP3 wars all over again. Steady platform growth and incremental feature updates is what benefits Apple and leaves a trail of iKillers in its path.
While Android Tablet companies are trying to blow their wad on a single device that's spec'd out with last week's technology, Apple is more interested in investing into long-term platform development, rather than doing unnecessary weekly hardware refreshes. "Tegra 2. Flavor of the week!" Who cares? Not the majority of people.
The important takeaway from this is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. This is where Motorola, Toshiba, Samsung, et al are failing. They don't give a shit about "openness" or "Android." They want to ship a number of devices this quarter, forget about it and then ship some more next quarter. Especially when they're not making any money from updates or app sales. Any bugfixes, updates, recalls, or any type of customer interaction is cutting into their already razor-thin margins.
Apple has healthy margins so it's better for them to keep providing updates to old hardware. It's all about the platform.
None of these Android ODMs care about growing and nurturing the platform whether it comes to constant updates or application compatibility. It's only market growth in raw numbers with the thinnest of margins, but that's just a consequence of dumping bargain-basement hardware into the stores by truckloads to see what sticks. See: Augens, Streaks, Galaxy Tab, and whatever Archos is doing.
On the mobile phone front if you pick up any two Android phones you'll see completely different methodologies, bizarre UI conventions, half-done features that exist for no logical reason for the sake of filling out checkboxes on spec sheets.
Despite this, Android phones took off because a) there was a vacuum of other more coherent, non-iOS platforms and b) because carriers subsidize the cost of the hardware and everyone needs a phone. It's an essential device.
Tablets face a much harder battle because majority of consumers are unwilling to sign a contract for a non-essential, secondary devices. Note the historically flaccid Netbook sales coupled with subsidies. This is especially true when most people have prior contracts with their phones. Having 2 mobile contracts doesn't quite gel.
Motorola XOOM's pricing came out today at $800 USD with additional, carrier specific caveats. You'd be insane to shell out that much money for a 1st gen, untested device with no compelling app ecosystem vis-Ã-vis iPad/2.
My belief is that the market is wide open right now and the second place is still up for grabs. Could be HP, could be Microsoft's new WP7 thing (if they get their heads out of their ass), or Android.
But just showing up with a tablet is not enough. You need to have healthy margins, curated app ecosystem, and platform continuity. iOS provides that. Android is too fragmented at the moment to pull it off. Sad thing is, Google is unwilling to exert any control and clean up their cluttered, spam-ridden marketplace or force these manufacturers into shipping devices without silly skins.
It's been said before that Android is a meta-platform, and I tend to agree with that. This gives hope to other OSes into jumping into the fray and becoming second to Apple. I truly believe that iPad has an iPod-like lock on the tablets for years to come (check above about subsidies).
How many times have you appeared in a slashdot topic? Show us your unique achievements you magnificent, undiscovered genius.
I've noticed that cynical disposition and the constant need to shit on anything that remotely looks like fun is inversely proportional to one's lack of accomplishments. Reminds me of idiots who say "Facebook? Any kid with knowledge of PHP could have done that. It was all luck." Instead, they sit in dark rooms and jerk it to manga all their lives and tear down those who have actually applied themselves and made stuff happen, no matter how trivial.
I'm sorry that a guy who has created something in a true geek spirit is unworthy of your attention, amidst the ever-important stream of hard hitting news found on/.
That's not in dispute. Microsoft is mad because for once they can't legally copy something someone else popularized. Unlike GUIs, you can trademark words and phrases associated with a product or service.
At $200 you're going to get junk. The components of a good tablet cost far more than $200 and companies have to have some kind of a margin to stay in business.
Suppose the $200 is a retail price, which means that distribution, engineering, and component costs have to be somewhere in the sub $200 range. I can't think how this is possible without magic. The capacitive 10" screen alone is generously pegged at $95 per unit by iSuppli and even then it doesn't have crazy PPI density found in iPhone4 or AMOLED screens.
VLC is a nice player on the desktop but there are far more superior solutions for the iPhone/iPad like AirVideo that isn't swamped in petty GPL politics. Plus the VLC interface on the iPhone was pretty bad. I'd be concerned if it was the only game in town. Otherwise, it's a non-story. This is VLC's loss.
It reminds me of Mozilla's backwards, dogmatic horseshit about supporting "open source" and not getting on the h.264 bandwagon with the rest of the grownups, all the while enabling the extremely user-hostile and proprietary Flash. Now their share is slowly being chipped away by Chrome which suffers from none of the political idiocy that comes with some FOSS projects.
Apple is great at many things. They're just excellent in their core competencies. No debate about it.
But they absolutely suck at social media on a grand scale. Hard to believe how tone-deaf they are when it comes to stuff like Ping and Gamecenter. Does it come from the leadership? Maybe. The company is run by old guys in their 40's and up. Maybe they just don't get it.
Perhaps they can hire back Guy Kawasaki to spearhead their social media wing. He saved Apple's bacon once. Perhaps he'll do it again if they asked him nicely.
There are many beneficiaries when flash eventually bites the dust and becomes a pariah like Java Applets. But I'd like to point out the biggest impact isn't the battery life, it's your crotch. Flash forces laptops to run extremely hot and it invariably burns your nads while you rewind Lady Gaga videos for the 20th time in a row.
The reason why male sack is situated in-between legs is because it needs to remain a certain temperature to function properly. Evolution never anticipated humans putting hot slabs of electronics on their privates for extended periods of time.
I'm not really seeing what's so extraordinary about this or how it's connected to "open source" outside of some tortured link with Blender.
Using MPAA's tactics to minimize the creative output of actual professionals seems like a dumb argument which amounts to "see, they can do it without major financial backing." When it comes to entertainment out in the real world, it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
The article title is your standard linkbait bullshit. "Challenges Hollywood's Best"? Hardly.
The love/hate relationship Slashdot has for Apple that's been going on since early 2000's is really fascinating. I think there is a bit of resentment from the rabid F/OSS crowd, to which I once belonged. These days I just can't bring myself to care that much about twisting my daily habits 5 different ways just for "The Cause." Above all I want shit that works. The option to spaz out in the command line is always couple of keystrokes away so I don't feel like I'm in the wilderness such as Windows where you have bolt-on idiotic things like cygwin or gui apache installers.
It doesn't help that lots and lots of alpha geeks jumped ship from Linux to OSX on a count of "it just works." For better or worse, it sort of exposed the glaring problems with blind "Open Über Alles" ideology and made the point that a bit of a benevolent dictatorship isn't that bad.
Hence you have this schism in geeklandia -- the "I just want the fucking thing to work so I can focus my efforts more efficiently" versus the "I want to control every aspect of my computing experience" purists. With the release of the iPad this rift is ever more pronounced.
Actually Bing has some features that outclass Google Search. Image search is so much better on Bing because it's dynamically loaded so you don't have to page through 20 times to get a full view of what's out there.
It would be nice if Bing, Yahoo, or whoever grabbed 30-50% of the search market. Microsoft scares me, but so does Google.
Google makes jack shit from Android "sales" because it's a free operating system. Even if there are 10 billion Android phones out there, ultimately the deciding factor is the quality of the apps, developer mindshare, and broad consumer acceptance.
Keep in mind, Android is not a phone. It's an operating system. In a greater scheme of things, consumers aren't buying Android. They're buying a Verizon smartphone or Motorola smartphone with their respective brands. So to say that "Android grew X % over Y period of time" is not really helpful for any meaningful metric.
iPhone is still the leader and will continue to be unless a strong competitor emerges out of the bunch and presents a unified front where they can clearly differentiate between devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that neither city of birth nor SSN are indicators of citizenship / residency.
This reminds me of the wifi data gathering operation where they amassed all this information "by mistake."
MacBook Air comes with Flash storage. Apple has said it themselves they are moving in that direction where SSDs would become the norm.
I have to admit, that's pretty "gangsta"
This is MP3 wars all over again. Steady platform growth and incremental feature updates is what benefits Apple and leaves a trail of iKillers in its path.
While Android Tablet companies are trying to blow their wad on a single device that's spec'd out with last week's technology, Apple is more interested in investing into long-term platform development, rather than doing unnecessary weekly hardware refreshes. "Tegra 2. Flavor of the week!" Who cares? Not the majority of people.
The important takeaway from this is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. This is where Motorola, Toshiba, Samsung, et al are failing. They don't give a shit about "openness" or "Android." They want to ship a number of devices this quarter, forget about it and then ship some more next quarter. Especially when they're not making any money from updates or app sales. Any bugfixes, updates, recalls, or any type of customer interaction is cutting into their already razor-thin margins.
Apple has healthy margins so it's better for them to keep providing updates to old hardware. It's all about the platform.
Born out of wedlock.
None of these Android ODMs care about growing and nurturing the platform whether it comes to constant updates or application compatibility. It's only market growth in raw numbers with the thinnest of margins, but that's just a consequence of dumping bargain-basement hardware into the stores by truckloads to see what sticks. See: Augens, Streaks, Galaxy Tab, and whatever Archos is doing.
On the mobile phone front if you pick up any two Android phones you'll see completely different methodologies, bizarre UI conventions, half-done features that exist for no logical reason for the sake of filling out checkboxes on spec sheets.
Despite this, Android phones took off because a) there was a vacuum of other more coherent, non-iOS platforms and b) because carriers subsidize the cost of the hardware and everyone needs a phone. It's an essential device.
Tablets face a much harder battle because majority of consumers are unwilling to sign a contract for a non-essential, secondary devices. Note the historically flaccid Netbook sales coupled with subsidies. This is especially true when most people have prior contracts with their phones. Having 2 mobile contracts doesn't quite gel.
Motorola XOOM's pricing came out today at $800 USD with additional, carrier specific caveats. You'd be insane to shell out that much money for a 1st gen, untested device with no compelling app ecosystem vis-Ã-vis iPad/2.
My belief is that the market is wide open right now and the second place is still up for grabs. Could be HP, could be Microsoft's new WP7 thing (if they get their heads out of their ass), or Android.
But just showing up with a tablet is not enough. You need to have healthy margins, curated app ecosystem, and platform continuity. iOS provides that. Android is too fragmented at the moment to pull it off. Sad thing is, Google is unwilling to exert any control and clean up their cluttered, spam-ridden marketplace or force these manufacturers into shipping devices without silly skins.
It's been said before that Android is a meta-platform, and I tend to agree with that. This gives hope to other OSes into jumping into the fray and becoming second to Apple. I truly believe that iPad has an iPod-like lock on the tablets for years to come (check above about subsidies).
By whom? Who is anticipating this aside from a handful of people on gadget blogs?
This is running smartphone OS on a tablet that's kinda-sorta not really a tablet and has been disowned by Google as "not ready."
Sometimes I wonder if the editors here are even paying attention.
By the way, Engadget gave it a pretty dismal score as far as gadgets go. 4/10
The Tunisian uprising was called Jasmine Revolution. If the Egyptian thing pans out they'll assign some new unrelated color.
Set the naming conventions according to the social media outlet which was instrumental in fomenting it. For example:
Twitter Revolution in Tunisia
Facebook Revolution in Egypt
Github Revolution in Jordan
How many times have you appeared in a slashdot topic? Show us your unique achievements you magnificent, undiscovered genius.
I've noticed that cynical disposition and the constant need to shit on anything that remotely looks like fun is inversely proportional to one's lack of accomplishments. Reminds me of idiots who say "Facebook? Any kid with knowledge of PHP could have done that. It was all luck." Instead, they sit in dark rooms and jerk it to manga all their lives and tear down those who have actually applied themselves and made stuff happen, no matter how trivial.
I'm sorry that a guy who has created something in a true geek spirit is unworthy of your attention, amidst the ever-important stream of hard hitting news found on /.
Haters gonna hate.
Cite your sources, mortal.
That's not in dispute. Microsoft is mad because for once they can't legally copy something someone else popularized. Unlike GUIs, you can trademark words and phrases associated with a product or service.
At $200 you're going to get junk. The components of a good tablet cost far more than $200 and companies have to have some kind of a margin to stay in business.
Suppose the $200 is a retail price, which means that distribution, engineering, and component costs have to be somewhere in the sub $200 range. I can't think how this is possible without magic. The capacitive 10" screen alone is generously pegged at $95 per unit by iSuppli and even then it doesn't have crazy PPI density found in iPhone4 or AMOLED screens.
I say, keep dreaming or buy disposable plastic.
VLC is a nice player on the desktop but there are far more superior solutions for the iPhone/iPad like AirVideo that isn't swamped in petty GPL politics. Plus the VLC interface on the iPhone was pretty bad. I'd be concerned if it was the only game in town. Otherwise, it's a non-story. This is VLC's loss.
It reminds me of Mozilla's backwards, dogmatic horseshit about supporting "open source" and not getting on the h.264 bandwagon with the rest of the grownups, all the while enabling the extremely user-hostile and proprietary Flash. Now their share is slowly being chipped away by Chrome which suffers from none of the political idiocy that comes with some FOSS projects.
Moving on.
Apple is great at many things. They're just excellent in their core competencies. No debate about it.
But they absolutely suck at social media on a grand scale. Hard to believe how tone-deaf they are when it comes to stuff like Ping and Gamecenter. Does it come from the leadership? Maybe. The company is run by old guys in their 40's and up. Maybe they just don't get it.
Perhaps they can hire back Guy Kawasaki to spearhead their social media wing. He saved Apple's bacon once. Perhaps he'll do it again if they asked him nicely.
Ask for his opinion about Farmville Subsidies.
There are many beneficiaries when flash eventually bites the dust and becomes a pariah like Java Applets. But I'd like to point out the biggest impact isn't the battery life, it's your crotch. Flash forces laptops to run extremely hot and it invariably burns your nads while you rewind Lady Gaga videos for the 20th time in a row.
The reason why male sack is situated in-between legs is because it needs to remain a certain temperature to function properly. Evolution never anticipated humans putting hot slabs of electronics on their privates for extended periods of time.
I'm not really seeing what's so extraordinary about this or how it's connected to "open source" outside of some tortured link with Blender.
Using MPAA's tactics to minimize the creative output of actual professionals seems like a dumb argument which amounts to "see, they can do it without major financial backing." When it comes to entertainment out in the real world, it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
The article title is your standard linkbait bullshit. "Challenges Hollywood's Best"? Hardly.
We already have that. It's call Los Angeles.
The love/hate relationship Slashdot has for Apple that's been going on since early 2000's is really fascinating. I think there is a bit of resentment from the rabid F/OSS crowd, to which I once belonged. These days I just can't bring myself to care that much about twisting my daily habits 5 different ways just for "The Cause." Above all I want shit that works. The option to spaz out in the command line is always couple of keystrokes away so I don't feel like I'm in the wilderness such as Windows where you have bolt-on idiotic things like cygwin or gui apache installers.
It doesn't help that lots and lots of alpha geeks jumped ship from Linux to OSX on a count of "it just works." For better or worse, it sort of exposed the glaring problems with blind "Open Über Alles" ideology and made the point that a bit of a benevolent dictatorship isn't that bad.
Hence you have this schism in geeklandia -- the "I just want the fucking thing to work so I can focus my efforts more efficiently" versus the "I want to control every aspect of my computing experience" purists. With the release of the iPad this rift is ever more pronounced.
They should just shoot another Moon landing footage on a studio lot in Burbank. That should be enough for another 40 years of national bravado.
Except this time we'll do it in 3-D and put it on Pay-Per-View with heavy product placement. Doritos Moonwalk? Why Not?
Russian media says the station is switching to soft rock.
In their defense, Dell had already secured the name to Gulf Oil Spill Tablet. It was either Hurricane or HP Malaria.
I can relate because one time I typed :q! instead of :w, losing about 5 minutes worth of typing. The typed text had sentimental value worth billions.
A commercial from France, late 80's
Think Different
It's very dark, but amazing. The target of the ad is IBM/Compatible, I presume.
Actually Bing has some features that outclass Google Search. Image search is so much better on Bing because it's dynamically loaded so you don't have to page through 20 times to get a full view of what's out there.
It would be nice if Bing, Yahoo, or whoever grabbed 30-50% of the search market. Microsoft scares me, but so does Google.
Let me break this genty to you.
Google makes jack shit from Android "sales" because it's a free operating system. Even if there are 10 billion Android phones out there, ultimately the deciding factor is the quality of the apps, developer mindshare, and broad consumer acceptance.
Keep in mind, Android is not a phone. It's an operating system. In a greater scheme of things, consumers aren't buying Android. They're buying a Verizon smartphone or Motorola smartphone with their respective brands. So to say that "Android grew X % over Y period of time" is not really helpful for any meaningful metric.
iPhone is still the leader and will continue to be unless a strong competitor emerges out of the bunch and presents a unified front where they can clearly differentiate between devices.