Of course it's better if all phones have a kill switch. But it's still useful if only iPhones do, as they are often specifically targeted by thieves. If thieves know iPhones can't be resold because they'll be bricked, they won't bother stealing them.
A less well known and identified brand would be a different story.
Remind me, which party was it that disenfranchised voters by skin colour in the 2000 election? Oh yet, I remember, it was the Republican party. The same party that had a brother of one of the candidates deliver the key state.
You have no room to be playing the victim. Your party is evil.
I'm sure that with everything we've learned recently regarding the Government and phones, there's no way this could -possibly- be abused!
Oh piss off with your libertarian paranoia. It's boring. Law enforcement are urging MANUFACTURERS to disable stolen phones. It's not the government demanding a kill switch that they operate.
Libertarians are like luddites that would keep the benefits of technological improvement away from people because of their stupid fears.
If my mobile phone is stolen, I want it disabled. And heck I don't want there to be an incentive to steal it anyway. You're a moron if you don't see this as a positive.
The Netmarketshere.com numbers do include iPad, but they also include Android tablets.
Your Wikimedia stats only have a single line for Android, which means you are comparing both Android phones AND tablets to just the iPhone. Removing tablets from one side and not the other doesn't make it a valid comparison.
And in this case we certainly should be including tablets, since the OP was talking about Android desktop. That's a shorter jump from a tablet than a phone.
You don't need Samsung to hold your hand to install the latest Android on a phone.
You need SOMEONE to build a ROM for a particular phone. And if Samsung doesn't do it, you're just hoping for some random amateur that you don't know to do it. And you'll download it from some web-site that says Flash at Your Own Risk. And then you'll have to go through some arcane process to actually do it.
Here's the thing, virtually no one does it. The most numerous version of Android in the wild is a version dating from 2010.
The most numerous version of iOS is always the latest. That's because they actually supply official updates to phones for a decent time. And they offer them all on the same release day. Unlike any of the Android manufacturers.
Is there fundamentally any reason why these couldn't be made with some material other than a metal? I mean once upon a time armour was steel, but now Kevlar can be used. Planes were aluminium but now carbon fibre can be used. Jet engine turbines are ceramic, etc. I'm not suggesting any of these particular materials are the right ones for this case, and indeed it might be a composite. But it doesn't seem impossible to do away with the last bits of metal, if someone wanted to do that.
"The file system is not revealed at all." Wrong. The apps on desk, apps in folders functionality IS a filesystem.
Not only is it not a filesystem, there is no desk.
You seem to believe that there is a folder somewhere on an iPhone that holds Apps, and each app is held in a file (or folder) with the name that is displayed in Springboard, and that putting an app into a folder in Springboard means putting the app into a directory in the file system. None of these things are true.
And just because it's a rectangular grid of icons with a folder system does not make it a file system. That's not in any way the defining characteristics of a filesystem.
The same as any other well designed app, Springboard is a designed UI metaphor, which does not simply reflect, nor is dependant on any particular implementation. And as it happens in this case the actual implementation is nothing like you see.
When I download or create a file
Your problem is that you've stuck with one particular metaphor for data, and an only think in terms of that one. It's where the puck is for legacy OSs, but it's not where it's going. Think about the increasing number of apps that are web based. Very few have any concept of a file, let alone a file system.
And because you're stuck with that one metaphor, you think systems fail or succeed based on whether they have hierarchical organisation. The fact that hierarchies are often very bad ways to organise doesn't occur to you. For one thing it's fundamentally broken when items belong in more than one category. That's why some file systems have the kludge of symlinks. And it's also broken in that relationships have no checking. You can keep a file path to a file, but if the user deleted that file, you have a dangling link. Not much different from a dangling pointer in C. To work round that brokenness, different OSs often have various types of APIs to watch the file system and report back on specific directories that have changed. Another kludge.
Take for another example of the brokenness of file hierarchies, the organisation of songs. Do you store them as Artist/Album/Song? If so what about when there are multiple artists? What about the Genre?
The deficiencies of file hierarchies were why tags were invented.
Rather than files in a hierarchy, it's far better to consider data to be objects, with attributes, including tags, and arbitrary relations between them. They MIGHT be implemented as files, not necessarily in the same hierarchy as the user sees. Or they might be implemented as SQL objects. Or they might be something unknown on the end of a web-service.
Yeas, the cloud really puts the spanner in the works of your old-fashioned views of computing. Whilst data was held locally, and you could assume it was on a disk drive, file system metaphors could work. How the data could be anywhere, your file hierarchy is a crap metaphor for humane interfaces.
You have no concept whatsoever of where the puck is heading.
I have yet to meet a single person with an Android phone that doesn't use it as a personal computer.
Anecdotes are not data. If they were I'd point out that I don't know a single person who uses one of the phone based office suites. Though obviously some people do. Quite possibly some people that I know. I just don't know the detail of their phone usage. And neither do you.
Web usage on the other hand is data. And it shows Android web browsing as a fraction of iOS browsing. Despite the fact there are more Android handsets out there. http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=1 That's why I point out most Android handsets are not being used for anything much more than dumb handsets. And that's because the market is flooded by cheap (free with a contract) phones, many of which happen to run Android.
Thinking that OSX market share is larger than Android market share is just silly.
That's not what I said. I simply made the point that having an Android phone does not make someone a potential person to replace Windows with Desktop Android.
Define android users. You only have to look at the user agent stats to see that most people with android phones aren't even browsing with them.
Most android phones are simply sold as a cheap phone that the salesman suggested at the phone shop. They are irrelevant, as they probably don't even know what android is, let alone are possible converts to desktop android.
Possible converts to android desktop are a fraction of osx's existing market share,
And the idea that android already has most of the app categories of windows a is hilarious. It has hardly any of them. It has a lot of mobile phone apps. It takes more than games and and an office suite to replace windows.
Mobile apps and desktop apps are very different things. If they consider android for desktop use they'll still have to figure out what apps they need to replace their windows ones. And of course the day when android has a full complement of desktop apps available is a long way off, if ever. Osx took many years, and desktop Linux hasn't managed it in two decades. Building desktop apps is a far bigger challenge than making mobile apps.
It's just not going to happen. Desktop android is destined to be a tiny niche.
Modern computing has enabled a communications and information facility we could only dream of a couple of decades ago. Human progress is happening more rapidly than ever as a result. Open your eyes.
To use the classic Slashdot car analogy, computer programming is like engineering new parts for the car. Either at a mainstream car company, or doing custom cars. It's not something the majority of people need to be doing.
Almost all of a car's usefulness lies in extra travel capabilities it gives to people. It's not in providing a target for people to learn about engineering.
For those limited number of people that want/need to learn programming, there will always be opportunities, such as the raspberry PI. We don't want to limit mainstream computing to what will make a good programming platform. That's a niche use of computers.
Apple have been offering a better desktop OS than windows for a long time. With 3rd parties gradually filling in all the missing niche apps. Yet their growth in the desktop market has been very much a trickle.
If you think a desktop android is going to quickly become a landslide against windows, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
No other OS is going to take over as majority desktop OS frm windows. It's just that windows is going to become ever more irrelevant as post pc devices mean that less and less is done with desktops.
The tablet pc concept failed a decade ago and it's failing again now. Tablets are not just form factor, they are also software. Both mobile specific UIs and the lower power requirements of mobile OSs are what's making the iPad and it's copycats successful.
Are existing pcs still going to hand around for a few years more because they are good enough already? Sure. I wouldn't want to have a job in pc support though. A declining market and supporting increasingly more obsolete machines. With no pressure for pay raises. Dead end.
Oh, and btw, having seen Jony Ives comment of it looking better because it relies on the (Swiss) grid design system, and also because of the flat graphic design think that'll make it easier for developers to make apps that fit the style. Which is good for me.
And of course app designers often design to appeal more to one gender or the other depending on their estimation of the demographics of likely users.
Gender neutral design? Not so easy. What a male designer and a female designer thinks is gender neutral will differ. Maybe this is gender neutral? I don't know. What do women think of it?
It was just my recollection of.a report. Now I look again it wasn't that there are more women users than men. It's that the split is 57% me for iPhone an 74% men for android.
So, yeah, that justification for a more feminine GUI was wrong.
But also I was going on the screen shots in saying this looked more feminine. Actually the UI picks up it's colour tints from the wallpaper and/or other content, so it will depend on the user.
As a man I didn't much like the look of the screen shots, but seeing more of it, and seeing it in motion I like it more. It'll probably just take a bit of getting used to.
Really don't like the look of the new control panel though.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's better if all phones have a kill switch. But it's still useful if only iPhones do, as they are often specifically targeted by thieves. If thieves know iPhones can't be resold because they'll be bricked, they won't bother stealing them.
A less well known and identified brand would be a different story.
Remind me, which party was it that disenfranchised voters by skin colour in the 2000 election? Oh yet, I remember, it was the Republican party. The same party that had a brother of one of the candidates deliver the key state.
You have no room to be playing the victim. Your party is evil.
I'm sure that with everything we've learned recently regarding the Government and phones, there's no way this could -possibly- be abused!
Oh piss off with your libertarian paranoia. It's boring. Law enforcement are urging MANUFACTURERS to disable stolen phones. It's not the government demanding a kill switch that they operate.
Libertarians are like luddites that would keep the benefits of technological improvement away from people because of their stupid fears.
If my mobile phone is stolen, I want it disabled. And heck I don't want there to be an incentive to steal it anyway. You're a moron if you don't see this as a positive.
The Netmarketshere.com numbers do include iPad, but they also include Android tablets.
Your Wikimedia stats only have a single line for Android, which means you are comparing both Android phones AND tablets to just the iPhone. Removing tablets from one side and not the other doesn't make it a valid comparison.
And in this case we certainly should be including tablets, since the OP was talking about Android desktop. That's a shorter jump from a tablet than a phone.
You don't need Samsung to hold your hand to install the latest Android on a phone.
You need SOMEONE to build a ROM for a particular phone. And if Samsung doesn't do it, you're just hoping for some random amateur that you don't know to do it. And you'll download it from some web-site that says Flash at Your Own Risk. And then you'll have to go through some arcane process to actually do it.
Here's the thing, virtually no one does it. The most numerous version of Android in the wild is a version dating from 2010.
The most numerous version of iOS is always the latest. That's because they actually supply official updates to phones for a decent time. And they offer them all on the same release day. Unlike any of the Android manufacturers.
How exactly did you check that? Or did you in fact pull it out of your ass?
Is there fundamentally any reason why these couldn't be made with some material other than a metal? I mean once upon a time armour was steel, but now Kevlar can be used. Planes were aluminium but now carbon fibre can be used. Jet engine turbines are ceramic, etc. I'm not suggesting any of these particular materials are the right ones for this case, and indeed it might be a composite. But it doesn't seem impossible to do away with the last bits of metal, if someone wanted to do that.
"The file system is not revealed at all."
Wrong. The apps on desk, apps in folders functionality IS a filesystem.
Not only is it not a filesystem, there is no desk.
You seem to believe that there is a folder somewhere on an iPhone that holds Apps, and each app is held in a file (or folder) with the name that is displayed in Springboard, and that putting an app into a folder in Springboard means putting the app into a directory in the file system. None of these things are true.
And just because it's a rectangular grid of icons with a folder system does not make it a file system. That's not in any way the defining characteristics of a filesystem.
The same as any other well designed app, Springboard is a designed UI metaphor, which does not simply reflect, nor is dependant on any particular implementation. And as it happens in this case the actual implementation is nothing like you see.
When I download or create a file
Your problem is that you've stuck with one particular metaphor for data, and an only think in terms of that one. It's where the puck is for legacy OSs, but it's not where it's going. Think about the increasing number of apps that are web based. Very few have any concept of a file, let alone a file system.
And because you're stuck with that one metaphor, you think systems fail or succeed based on whether they have hierarchical organisation. The fact that hierarchies are often very bad ways to organise doesn't occur to you. For one thing it's fundamentally broken when items belong in more than one category. That's why some file systems have the kludge of symlinks. And it's also broken in that relationships have no checking. You can keep a file path to a file, but if the user deleted that file, you have a dangling link. Not much different from a dangling pointer in C. To work round that brokenness, different OSs often have various types of APIs to watch the file system and report back on specific directories that have changed. Another kludge.
Take for another example of the brokenness of file hierarchies, the organisation of songs. Do you store them as Artist/Album/Song? If so what about when there are multiple artists? What about the Genre?
The deficiencies of file hierarchies were why tags were invented.
Rather than files in a hierarchy, it's far better to consider data to be objects, with attributes, including tags, and arbitrary relations between them. They MIGHT be implemented as files, not necessarily in the same hierarchy as the user sees. Or they might be implemented as SQL objects. Or they might be something unknown on the end of a web-service.
Yeas, the cloud really puts the spanner in the works of your old-fashioned views of computing. Whilst data was held locally, and you could assume it was on a disk drive, file system metaphors could work. How the data could be anywhere, your file hierarchy is a crap metaphor for humane interfaces.
You have no concept whatsoever of where the puck is heading.
I have yet to meet a single person with an Android phone that doesn't use it as a personal computer.
Anecdotes are not data. If they were I'd point out that I don't know a single person who uses one of the phone based office suites. Though obviously some people do. Quite possibly some people that I know. I just don't know the detail of their phone usage. And neither do you.
Web usage on the other hand is data. And it shows Android web browsing as a fraction of iOS browsing. Despite the fact there are more Android handsets out there.
http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=1
That's why I point out most Android handsets are not being used for anything much more than dumb handsets. And that's because the market is flooded by cheap (free with a contract) phones, many of which happen to run Android.
Thinking that OSX market share is larger than Android market share is just silly.
That's not what I said. I simply made the point that having an Android phone does not make someone a potential person to replace Windows with Desktop Android.
If you don't know from looking at the book, which is oldest, then why does it matter to the reading order?
Sorry but I'm finding this only slightly less obscure than your preferred graphics app.
Define android users. You only have to look at the user agent stats to see that most people with android phones aren't even browsing with them.
Most android phones are simply sold as a cheap phone that the salesman suggested at the phone shop. They are irrelevant, as they probably don't even know what android is, let alone are possible converts to desktop android.
Possible converts to android desktop are a fraction of osx's existing market share,
And the idea that android already has most of the app categories of windows a is hilarious. It has hardly any of them. It has a lot of mobile phone apps. It takes more than games and and an office suite to replace windows.
Mobile apps and desktop apps are very different things. If they consider android for desktop use they'll still have to figure out what apps they need to replace their windows ones. And of course the day when android has a full complement of desktop apps available is a long way off, if ever. Osx took many years, and desktop Linux hasn't managed it in two decades. Building desktop apps is a far bigger challenge than making mobile apps.
It's just not going to happen. Desktop android is destined to be a tiny niche.
In which case it'd be better and cheaper to have a iPad like tablet or smartphone for the train, and a traditional pc at the office.
Each time you want to start reading a book, look for the oldest unread one on the device.
Modern computing has enabled a communications and information facility we could only dream of a couple of decades ago. Human progress is happening more rapidly than ever as a result. Open your eyes.
To use the classic Slashdot car analogy, computer programming is like engineering new parts for the car. Either at a mainstream car company, or doing custom cars. It's not something the majority of people need to be doing.
Almost all of a car's usefulness lies in extra travel capabilities it gives to people. It's not in providing a target for people to learn about engineering.
For those limited number of people that want/need to learn programming, there will always be opportunities, such as the raspberry PI. We don't want to limit mainstream computing to what will make a good programming platform. That's a niche use of computers.
I'd be even more restrictive. I only include machines with x86 derived CPUs, designed to run DOS/windows.
Pilots and doctors are a couple of the most obvious top end workers that use tablets for work.
It's also fun, because it makes apple the number one pc manufacturer.
Apple have been offering a better desktop OS than windows for a long time. With 3rd parties gradually filling in all the missing niche apps. Yet their growth in the desktop market has been very much a trickle.
If you think a desktop android is going to quickly become a landslide against windows, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
No other OS is going to take over as majority desktop OS frm windows. It's just that windows is going to become ever more irrelevant as post pc devices mean that less and less is done with desktops.
What's the use case for metro to play with on the train?
The tablet pc concept failed a decade ago and it's failing again now. Tablets are not just form factor, they are also software. Both mobile specific UIs and the lower power requirements of mobile OSs are what's making the iPad and it's copycats successful.
Are existing pcs still going to hand around for a few years more because they are good enough already? Sure. I wouldn't want to have a job in pc support though. A declining market and supporting increasingly more obsolete machines. With no pressure for pay raises. Dead end.
Oh, and btw, having seen Jony Ives comment of it looking better because it relies on the (Swiss) grid design system, and also because of the flat graphic design think that'll make it easier for developers to make apps that fit the style. Which is good for me.
And of course app designers often design to appeal more to one gender or the other depending on their estimation of the demographics of likely users.
Gender neutral design? Not so easy. What a male designer and a female designer thinks is gender neutral will differ. Maybe this is gender neutral? I don't know. What do women think of it?
It was just my recollection of.a report. Now I look again it wasn't that there are more women users than men. It's that the split is 57% me for iPhone an 74% men for android.
So, yeah, that justification for a more feminine GUI was wrong.
But also I was going on the screen shots in saying this looked more feminine. Actually the UI picks up it's colour tints from the wallpaper and/or other content, so it will depend on the user.
As a man I didn't much like the look of the screen shots, but seeing more of it, and seeing it in motion I like it more. It'll probably just take a bit of getting used to.
Really don't like the look of the new control panel though.