Sounds like a little reverse Hollywood accounting could do wonders.
It's a percentage of ticket sales? Then if tickets used to cost $10 and food/drink costs another $10, make every ticket a non-optional "movie and refreshment" that's $11... but on the books it's broken down as $1 for the actual ticket, and the now-mandatory refreshments remain $10.
Hell, if a theatre is making only 10% of the ticket price anyway, then their per-ticket revenue goes from $1.00 to $0.10, but what's a loss of $0.90 per ticket when literally everyone is paying for refreshments, from which AFAIK they get a higher percentage in the first place? It's a win for the theatre/chain, win for the refreshment vendors, and a big win for theatre-goers--instead of a paying $20 per ticket if you want to eat, it now costs $9 less, and those who normally wouldn't eat only pay $1 more (people can pay extra to "upgrade" their refreshment).
The only losers would be the distributors and studios. How sad.
(Yes, yes, fantasy land, they'll just increase the print rental cost again, or re-do the contract to dip into the refreshment revenue...)
When we eval'ed it, a month after release, loading simple, 500 kB PDFs from our website would freeze the entire unit for seconds at a time (trying to invoke multitasking and other controls didn't work), and bringing off-screen parts of the page into view frequently wouldn't render.
Adobe Acrobat-created PDFs, opening in the Adobe PDF Reader app on the Playbook. One could blame it on Adobe or its browser plug-in, but the OS shouldn't allow itself to get locked up by an app/plugin.
It may be blackmail in a sense, but unlike the "campaign donations are free speech" bullshit (also a form of blackmail--do what we want or we don't donate to you again) this involves getting actual people potentially involved. In a democracy, it's still the people who vote for the representatives (cynic: the money just ensures corporate compliancy afterwards).
In your rush to post a put-down, you missed my point entirely.
You wrote "This is indeed a sign that Android has arrived. The malware authors are just going where the money is."
The iPhone "arrived" several years ago. That's where the money was and a lot of it still is (fools and their money soon parted, etc, right?). But malware authors were unable to exploit it to the extent Android is experiencing.
Malware authors are going after the low hanging fruit. The big money has been iPhone users for several years, but no bona fide malware has managed to monetize them successfully so far.
The kilo, mega, giga etc terms have been misused for decades by the tech industry to (usually) mean 2^10, 2^20 etc instead of 10^3, 10^6, etc. Marketing only recently started reversing this to "correct" base-10 usage, as a means of delivering less capacity than technical people expect from hard drives and other storage systems.
Good luck getting tech people to use "walled garden" correctly.
Latest ComScore numbers for the US show Microsoft in 4th place now, ahead of Symbian but way behind Android, Apple and even RIM.
Note these numbers are market share (sales in a given period; last 3 months in this case); if you're looking at installed base (number of sold units still in use) Symbian is still far ahead, but its future is uncertain at best, with further development and support being outsourced by Nokia to Accenture.
The 3GS is nearly 3 years old and falls behind every Android phone produced in the last year in terms of OS updatability (meaning you will never get iOS5 on it) versus almost every new android phone getting 4.0
Funny, iOS 5 installed just fine on my nearly 3-year old 3GS, and new 3GS being sold today come with iOS5 pre-installed.
And several Android phones released in the last year will NOT get the 4.x ICS upgrade, including the LG Optimus V (released Feb 1, 2011) and Motorola Atrix (Feb 22, 2011). Per LG's update plans from a few days ago, only 11 of their phones are officially slated to get ICS. I didn't bother checking the other vendors, but it's obvious not "every" Android phone in the last year can be upgraded to the latest firmware, while a nearly 3-year old iPhone can (and I'll bet very few 2-year old Android devices, never mind 3-year old ones, will get 4.x ICS).
Apple will continue to lose overall market share. It's of course inevitable when they control every aspect of it and are the only manufacturer that runs iOS, while anyone can make dozens of models of cheap Android devices. Limiting themselves to a new model and OS features every year is also a problem, despite the irony that Apple gets flamed by haters for releasing new models "too quickly" who ignore the dozens of new Android phones are released each year.
However, you can't just write them off as an "also-ran that doesn't know it yet". Comscore reports that by end of November, Apple increased its market share by 1.4% to 28.7%. Android increased by 3.1%, RIM was down by the same amount, and Microsoft lost 0.5%.
Another way to look at it ("rigging the stats" if you want) is that Android improved on existing market share by 7%, Apple improved by 5%, RIM declined by 15.7%, and Microsoft declined by 8.8%. If there's an also-ran in this bunch it's not Apple.
In the case of Germany and Japan, the Americans and allies were dealing with nationalist sentiment, plus none of Germany/Japan's neighbours were sympathetic to their occupation after the atrocities inflicted by them.
(South) Korea is entirely different, the two Koreas are still technically at war.
With Iran (and Iraq and Afghanistan), you're not dealing with just nationalist elements, you're dealing with religious fundamentalists (sometimes foreign-controlled with local elements) who know how to play up the stir up victim mentality in the local populations and turn many toward their holy war against the Great Satan.
Not in Canada, where Bell still charges about $4 for touchtone service. My parents are grandfathered into a plan without this fee (they dial out pulse, and can then switch to touchtone if they have menus to navigate), but for all new traditional landline connections it's a non-optional fee.
Just another reason I ditched my landline when I finally got a cell phone.
Facebook is just a steady stream of crap that I don't care about from people who don't have anything better to do than tell us about their mood every 30 minutes or giving us a play by play of the cats day.
You can block from your newsfeed friends that write steady streams of crap, without unfriending them.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, only one of the dozens of us who tried G+ bothers posting there anymore. The atmosphere is that of a barren wasteland.
On my FB an average day sees ten or twenty original posts, plus all the comments. And over half the "immature" or "naughty" content on my FB comes from middle-age or older women on my friends list.
I'm early-30s, and anecdotally, all the 50+ (never mind 30-50) year olds I know who are using social networks are on Facebook, not G+. Some of them are the most prolific posters of status updates, photos, and links, too.
Dozens of us tried out G+ when it was making the news early this year, but it's dropped off to almost nothing the last few months. Only one friend posts at all on G+ anymore, and he cross-posts everything to FB anyway.
LinkedIn is the business and professional's social network.
MySpace failed for a number of reasons, teen drama played but a small part. FB may have that drama but FB lets you easily avoid it, either by not friending (or de-friending) them, or blocking their game/app requests, or just "unsubscribe" from their angsty updates.
Facebook has plenty of flaws and shortcomings, privacy being near the top of the list, but their ability to keep the vast majority of social networking traffic is not one of them.
iOS 4.x on the iPhone 3G was a botch job. It couldn't do multitasking, and realistically all you got was app folders and you could change the homescreen background image. For that, 3G users suffered extreme performance issues and laggy input response times. Even on the 3GS (which I had), it wasn't until later updates that mostly restored the responsiveness.
iOS5 on the 3GS was a very good update. Gained new features and actually gained a bit of speed and responsiveness back. Battery life suffered, but I was willing to put up with that in exchange for not losing responsiveness.
The fee was dropped months after the PR damage was done. Device makers knew what Apple wanted for it, and knew if they got on board even with the lower fees, if the industry became dependent on it then Apple could jack up the license fees and terms again later.
At the time, USB2 wasn't yet built-in on many devices or PCs. The Firewire license fee fiasco jump-started mass adoption as it became obvious people wanted high-speed transfers to mp3 players, but no one wanted to pay Apple the license fee. And so we got stuck with a technically inferior interface for high-speed device transfers for most of a decade.
Thunderbolt, at least, doesn't have this license fee, but it's expensive enough on its own. Not that there isn't good reason for it, but as you say, existing interfaces might just be "good enough."
Then you needed to clarify "voice control". Siri still lacks some voice capabilities available on Android and others, but as an integrated assistant with natural language recognition Siri is a leap forward from the "voice control" (your words) that Android had.
Iris was NOT "done" in 8 hours, that was a nice press release and demo that glossed over the many issues that first alpha version had. 2 months after that "8 hours", the Iris blog still noted incomplete features and scalability issues. Just because the very basic functionality was duplicated after 8 hours, doesn't mean it's actually usable by regular consumers (among other things, two required voice-related libraries aren't standard on most Android installs and must be installed manually), and it certainly wasn't an out-of-box feature, so it's not a "comparable [Android] technology". Remember Siri was a standalone app for over a year on iOS and Android, standalone 3rd party apps are not a "feature" of any OS, but an out-of-box integration is.
Copy, paste, and multitasking were available long before Android. On WinCE and Blackberry. I never disputed that Apple wasn't first with these, only your claim that they were introduced to iOS only "in the past year."
Though a 1.8" HDD was a "fairly obvious" evolution of mp3 players at the time (Apple arguable saw its potential first though, and bought up the market for awhile), the inclusion of Firewire was not. Other players would have eventually used USB2, but in the "good enough" and "keep it cheap" philosophy of Windows PC hardware, USB1's glacial speeds would've remained for another year or two had Apple not jump-started the "transfer files to player fast" bandwagon.
Firewire 400 is still superior to USB2 in almost all technical comparisons, but didn't take off because Apple shot itself in the foot trying to charge a ridiculous $1-per-port license fee for it.
GP didn't claim Apple created the micro HDD. He correctly noted that Apple was the first to combine several existing or fairly new technologies, including Firewire which they, incidentally, co-created (no longer used on iPods or iPhones today, but back then 400 Mbps Firewire was far faster than the 12 Mbps that the USB1 ports on other mp3 players used, and still consistently faster than 480 Mbps USB2).
They were the first to combine the right elements for an mp3 player, along with some marketing, to hit the ball out of the park.
Voice control was introduced with iPhone 3GS in 2009. Siri was bought by Apple in 2010 and integrated into the iPhone 4S in late 2011. Android does NOT have out-of-box technology comparable to Siri, otherwise post-iPhone 4S Android projects like Iris and Google's own Majel (announced only a couple weeks ago) would not exist.
iPhone copy-paste was introduced mid-2009, user-controlled multitasking in mid-2010.
Your argument isn't without merit but don't use incorrect "facts" to prop them up, you just undermine your credibility
Damn straight! Would you believe they named the second LOTR film "The Two Towers"? Obviously pandered to the patriotic American public after 9/11 but it was damn insensitive. There was even a petition to change the name before it came out, but Hollywood never listens. Anything to make a buck!
They said that in the 50s and 60s, when ICBMs were supposed to replace fighter planes.
While remote-operated drones can and will replace a lot of "meathauler" plane functions, for the foreseeable future there will still be a role for fighter aircraft flown by people on board.
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Sounds like a little reverse Hollywood accounting could do wonders.
It's a percentage of ticket sales? Then if tickets used to cost $10 and food/drink costs another $10, make every ticket a non-optional "movie and refreshment" that's $11... but on the books it's broken down as $1 for the actual ticket, and the now-mandatory refreshments remain $10.
Hell, if a theatre is making only 10% of the ticket price anyway, then their per-ticket revenue goes from $1.00 to $0.10, but what's a loss of $0.90 per ticket when literally everyone is paying for refreshments, from which AFAIK they get a higher percentage in the first place? It's a win for the theatre/chain, win for the refreshment vendors, and a big win for theatre-goers--instead of a paying $20 per ticket if you want to eat, it now costs $9 less, and those who normally wouldn't eat only pay $1 more (people can pay extra to "upgrade" their refreshment).
The only losers would be the distributors and studios. How sad.
(Yes, yes, fantasy land, they'll just increase the print rental cost again, or re-do the contract to dip into the refreshment revenue...)
When we eval'ed it, a month after release, loading simple, 500 kB PDFs from our website would freeze the entire unit for seconds at a time (trying to invoke multitasking and other controls didn't work), and bringing off-screen parts of the page into view frequently wouldn't render.
Adobe Acrobat-created PDFs, opening in the Adobe PDF Reader app on the Playbook. One could blame it on Adobe or its browser plug-in, but the OS shouldn't allow itself to get locked up by an app/plugin.
It may be blackmail in a sense, but unlike the "campaign donations are free speech" bullshit (also a form of blackmail--do what we want or we don't donate to you again) this involves getting actual people potentially involved. In a democracy, it's still the people who vote for the representatives (cynic: the money just ensures corporate compliancy afterwards).
This is Google's explanation. From two years ago.
If it's blank now because Google is still not "satisfied with the map data we had available" then Bing Maps is kicking their ass in that area.
In your rush to post a put-down, you missed my point entirely.
You wrote "This is indeed a sign that Android has arrived. The malware authors are just going where the money is."
The iPhone "arrived" several years ago. That's where the money was and a lot of it still is (fools and their money soon parted, etc, right?). But malware authors were unable to exploit it to the extent Android is experiencing.
It substitutes for a four-letter word, so it's actually "frak" in BSG.
Malware authors are going after the low hanging fruit. The big money has been iPhone users for several years, but no bona fide malware has managed to monetize them successfully so far.
The kilo, mega, giga etc terms have been misused for decades by the tech industry to (usually) mean 2^10, 2^20 etc instead of 10^3, 10^6, etc. Marketing only recently started reversing this to "correct" base-10 usage, as a means of delivering less capacity than technical people expect from hard drives and other storage systems.
Good luck getting tech people to use "walled garden" correctly.
Latest ComScore numbers for the US show Microsoft in 4th place now, ahead of Symbian but way behind Android, Apple and even RIM.
Note these numbers are market share (sales in a given period; last 3 months in this case); if you're looking at installed base (number of sold units still in use) Symbian is still far ahead, but its future is uncertain at best, with further development and support being outsourced by Nokia to Accenture.
The 3GS is nearly 3 years old and falls behind every Android phone produced in the last year in terms of OS updatability (meaning you will never get iOS5 on it) versus almost every new android phone getting 4.0
Funny, iOS 5 installed just fine on my nearly 3-year old 3GS, and new 3GS being sold today come with iOS5 pre-installed.
And several Android phones released in the last year will NOT get the 4.x ICS upgrade, including the LG Optimus V (released Feb 1, 2011) and Motorola Atrix (Feb 22, 2011). Per LG's update plans from a few days ago, only 11 of their phones are officially slated to get ICS. I didn't bother checking the other vendors, but it's obvious not "every" Android phone in the last year can be upgraded to the latest firmware, while a nearly 3-year old iPhone can (and I'll bet very few 2-year old Android devices, never mind 3-year old ones, will get 4.x ICS).
Apple will continue to lose overall market share. It's of course inevitable when they control every aspect of it and are the only manufacturer that runs iOS, while anyone can make dozens of models of cheap Android devices. Limiting themselves to a new model and OS features every year is also a problem, despite the irony that Apple gets flamed by haters for releasing new models "too quickly" who ignore the dozens of new Android phones are released each year.
However, you can't just write them off as an "also-ran that doesn't know it yet". Comscore reports that by end of November, Apple increased its market share by 1.4% to 28.7%. Android increased by 3.1%, RIM was down by the same amount, and Microsoft lost 0.5%.
Another way to look at it ("rigging the stats" if you want) is that Android improved on existing market share by 7%, Apple improved by 5%, RIM declined by 15.7%, and Microsoft declined by 8.8%. If there's an also-ran in this bunch it's not Apple.
In the case of Germany and Japan, the Americans and allies were dealing with nationalist sentiment, plus none of Germany/Japan's neighbours were sympathetic to their occupation after the atrocities inflicted by them.
(South) Korea is entirely different, the two Koreas are still technically at war.
With Iran (and Iraq and Afghanistan), you're not dealing with just nationalist elements, you're dealing with religious fundamentalists (sometimes foreign-controlled with local elements) who know how to play up the stir up victim mentality in the local populations and turn many toward their holy war against the Great Satan.
Not in Canada, where Bell still charges about $4 for touchtone service. My parents are grandfathered into a plan without this fee (they dial out pulse, and can then switch to touchtone if they have menus to navigate), but for all new traditional landline connections it's a non-optional fee.
Just another reason I ditched my landline when I finally got a cell phone.
Facebook is just a steady stream of crap that I don't care about from people who don't have anything better to do than tell us about their mood every 30 minutes or giving us a play by play of the cats day.
You can block from your newsfeed friends that write steady streams of crap, without unfriending them.
In other words, you're doing it wrong :-)
Yes, but we get the term "doctor" from him!
(mentioned in an episode last season, but the show's current producer wrote this idea in a USENET post back in 1996...
What "atmosphere" does G+ give?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, only one of the dozens of us who tried G+ bothers posting there anymore. The atmosphere is that of a barren wasteland.
On my FB an average day sees ten or twenty original posts, plus all the comments. And over half the "immature" or "naughty" content on my FB comes from middle-age or older women on my friends list.
I'm early-30s, and anecdotally, all the 50+ (never mind 30-50) year olds I know who are using social networks are on Facebook, not G+. Some of them are the most prolific posters of status updates, photos, and links, too.
Dozens of us tried out G+ when it was making the news early this year, but it's dropped off to almost nothing the last few months. Only one friend posts at all on G+ anymore, and he cross-posts everything to FB anyway.
LinkedIn is the business and professional's social network.
MySpace failed for a number of reasons, teen drama played but a small part. FB may have that drama but FB lets you easily avoid it, either by not friending (or de-friending) them, or blocking their game/app requests, or just "unsubscribe" from their angsty updates.
Facebook has plenty of flaws and shortcomings, privacy being near the top of the list, but their ability to keep the vast majority of social networking traffic is not one of them.
iOS 4.x on the iPhone 3G was a botch job. It couldn't do multitasking, and realistically all you got was app folders and you could change the homescreen background image. For that, 3G users suffered extreme performance issues and laggy input response times. Even on the 3GS (which I had), it wasn't until later updates that mostly restored the responsiveness.
iOS5 on the 3GS was a very good update. Gained new features and actually gained a bit of speed and responsiveness back. Battery life suffered, but I was willing to put up with that in exchange for not losing responsiveness.
The fee was dropped months after the PR damage was done. Device makers knew what Apple wanted for it, and knew if they got on board even with the lower fees, if the industry became dependent on it then Apple could jack up the license fees and terms again later.
At the time, USB2 wasn't yet built-in on many devices or PCs. The Firewire license fee fiasco jump-started mass adoption as it became obvious people wanted high-speed transfers to mp3 players, but no one wanted to pay Apple the license fee. And so we got stuck with a technically inferior interface for high-speed device transfers for most of a decade.
Thunderbolt, at least, doesn't have this license fee, but it's expensive enough on its own. Not that there isn't good reason for it, but as you say, existing interfaces might just be "good enough."
Then you needed to clarify "voice control". Siri still lacks some voice capabilities available on Android and others, but as an integrated assistant with natural language recognition Siri is a leap forward from the "voice control" (your words) that Android had.
Iris was NOT "done" in 8 hours, that was a nice press release and demo that glossed over the many issues that first alpha version had. 2 months after that "8 hours", the Iris blog still noted incomplete features and scalability issues. Just because the very basic functionality was duplicated after 8 hours, doesn't mean it's actually usable by regular consumers (among other things, two required voice-related libraries aren't standard on most Android installs and must be installed manually), and it certainly wasn't an out-of-box feature, so it's not a "comparable [Android] technology". Remember Siri was a standalone app for over a year on iOS and Android, standalone 3rd party apps are not a "feature" of any OS, but an out-of-box integration is.
Copy, paste, and multitasking were available long before Android. On WinCE and Blackberry. I never disputed that Apple wasn't first with these, only your claim that they were introduced to iOS only "in the past year."
Though a 1.8" HDD was a "fairly obvious" evolution of mp3 players at the time (Apple arguable saw its potential first though, and bought up the market for awhile), the inclusion of Firewire was not. Other players would have eventually used USB2, but in the "good enough" and "keep it cheap" philosophy of Windows PC hardware, USB1's glacial speeds would've remained for another year or two had Apple not jump-started the "transfer files to player fast" bandwagon.
Firewire 400 is still superior to USB2 in almost all technical comparisons, but didn't take off because Apple shot itself in the foot trying to charge a ridiculous $1-per-port license fee for it.
GP didn't claim Apple created the micro HDD. He correctly noted that Apple was the first to combine several existing or fairly new technologies, including Firewire which they, incidentally, co-created (no longer used on iPods or iPhones today, but back then 400 Mbps Firewire was far faster than the 12 Mbps that the USB1 ports on other mp3 players used, and still consistently faster than 480 Mbps USB2).
They were the first to combine the right elements for an mp3 player, along with some marketing, to hit the ball out of the park.
Voice control was introduced with iPhone 3GS in 2009. Siri was bought by Apple in 2010 and integrated into the iPhone 4S in late 2011. Android does NOT have out-of-box technology comparable to Siri, otherwise post-iPhone 4S Android projects like Iris and Google's own Majel (announced only a couple weeks ago) would not exist.
iPhone copy-paste was introduced mid-2009, user-controlled multitasking in mid-2010.
Your argument isn't without merit but don't use incorrect "facts" to prop them up, you just undermine your credibility
Talk about creepy timing.
Jacob Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90
In this article they even discuss criticisms of Xerox not commercializing technologies developed at PARC.
Damn straight! Would you believe they named the second LOTR film "The Two Towers"? Obviously pandered to the patriotic American public after 9/11 but it was damn insensitive. There was even a petition to change the name before it came out, but Hollywood never listens. Anything to make a buck!
They said that in the 50s and 60s, when ICBMs were supposed to replace fighter planes.
While remote-operated drones can and will replace a lot of "meathauler" plane functions, for the foreseeable future there will still be a role for fighter aircraft flown by people on board.