If walled gardens completely take over then all entertainment software / content will be developed by a small cliche of companies and you will have to accept what ever they decide to produce.
The reality contradicts your theory. There are 121,000 companies and individuals with apps published on the iPhone App Store.
Which is all well and good until you decide you want to watch a DVD or play a DRMed file for which the gardener didn't feel support was acceptable.
All a real user cares about is watching the content. (S)he doesn't care what format it's in. Why would a provider of content not release content in a format that Apple devices support? They might not support Apple devices if they are trying to make some sort of ideological point. But if they actually want as many people as possible to see the content, they will release in a format or formats that cover all the big platforms.
I could spend days writing about why windows is shit. And I probably have done over the years. It comes into two categories:
1) The designers of the Windows UI have no taste. 2) The architecture behind Windows is flawed.
Now I'm not going to bore myself repeating things I've complained of before, so here's a new one. I haven't touched Windows for a couple of years, but I had to use someone else's PC yesterday and had to copy a directory. A dialog comes up and the most prominent, eye catching thing is an animation of a page in space, doing some rotations and then resting back in the same place in space. Repeated over and over. An animation that serves no purpose whatsoever, is not representative of the action that is happening, and is so busy it distracts the eye from the things that are giving information. It certainly does not have the purpose of showing that something is happening. There's already a real progress bar already that has a built in pulse animation to reassure that the task is progressing.
Why is it there? Because Windows has always had an animation there, since Windows 95. But back then, it was less in your face, and actually gave a clue and some reassurance as to the operation taking place. A page used to go from somewhere to somewhere else. Over the years that animation has grown bigger and more distracting, and less meaningful.
That animation is nothing more than distracting bling. It breaks fundamental rules of UI design. And it shows bad taste.
Now that my be just one small thing, albeit in a central OS interaction. But when using Windows I find these annoying things during every single task. The UI is awful.
And just a quick one on the architecture side: The Registry is a fundamentally misguided idea. This huge data structure that no one piece of software is responsible for. It grows and grows until the computer starts to slow to a crawl. At that stage it either needs expert and time consuming surgery. Or more commonly, someone needs to waste a day reinstalling the OS and all the important apps. The registry is probably the worse architectural decision I've ever seen in any OS.
As you don't have an iOS device, it's doubtful that you ever seriously looked.
But there's a bigger thing here. It appears you use "the free alternatives" on Android, which means that you do use apps, but you don't consider them to be worth $1. One can only conclude that you don't value your time as worth much either.
Great for you. Even if my data was slightly wrong for your particular country, you still proved my point
No, I proved your point wrong.
the vastly superior Galaxy S2
You say it's superior. My friend has one, and it's a piece of shit. He uses it for a sat-nav for example, and it's forever misleading him on where to go. And sometimes it just hangs. And on occasions he's asked me to do something with it because h's driving, I've found that the UI is awful.
and you're a fraud and a shill.
Except for the fact that I'm right, and I gave the links to prove it. You're a bad loser, sonny.
Unless you donate every penny you make above the poverty line to someone who would otherwise die, you're just as guilty as they are.
What a world of extremes you do live in. A binary world where everything is all equally one thing or all equally another thing. A world where a child stealing candy is as guilty as an armed robber.
It's also a tu quoque fallacious argument. What I do bears no relation to the question of whether it's evil to let people die in order to maximise profits. The rights and wrongs of the drug companies don't rely on what BasilBrush gets up to. But it's even worse than that because you have no idea what I do anyway.
I think my duties to other human beings are limited - I don't think that the fact that people starve, or die of cholera, or have repressive governments, means that we shouldn't have movies, music, or Disney World.
I don't either. And that has nothing to do with the point I made.
You have this odd focus on murder, as though the gradations of killing another person and making more money are equivalent. The drug companies do offer life-extending compounds, but unless you already lead a rich-country lifestyle they're astonishingly unlikely to do much for you.
Waiving patent rights on the various anti-AIDS drugs for people in Africa would make a huge difference. It would save the lives of countless people. It would still allow the drugs companies to make their profits in the developed countries of the world. They don't do it because they can make a little more profit selling to the few in Africa who can afford it. That's evil. And nothing you've said is a valid argument to say it isn't. And nothing you can say is a valid argument that it isn't.
That would be the AT&T version of the iPhone not the Verizon version apparently according to Verizon.
To the best of my knowledge there is a single OS image per device. So all iPhone 4 units have Carrier IQ and all iPhone 4S units don't have it. Regardless of which carrier. Though perhaps it's coded to it only actually runs when on some carriers and not on others.
I think killing people is acceptable too, in certain circumstances. There are always dividing lines.
I'm afraid the "where is the dividing line?" argument is as fallacious as the "who's the arbiter?" argument. It's a variant of the slippery slope fallacy.
In order to actually make a real argument, you have come up with a reason why it's OK to let people die in order to make more profits. Because that is undeniably what happens.
ummmm....who cares? i'm no more interested in paying $1 to $10 for a crappy iOS app than I would be to pay it for a crappy Android applet.
I'm not interested in paying for shit either. I look at the reviews and videos and just buy the decent stuff. But it goes further than that. I'm not interested in using shit even if it's free. And a hell of a lot more free stuff is shit than commercial stuff. Desktop Linux for example is one of the biggest piles of shit there is. You're more than welcome to it.
Apple's been good for the Music industry. Before Apple, the music industry had failed many times to sell music downloads. And Apple got to where there are in music sales by innovating and being the best.
Likewise Apple's been good for Google. As I said, iPhone has always used their search. And ships with clients for their maps and YouTube too. And as things were, as long as Google remained the highest quality suppliers, that wouldn't have changed. Heck, Apple was so solid in their relationship with Google they even had Google's CEO on their board of directors.
The truth is that Android was never intended to combat Apple. Development started way before the iPhone came out. And the then Blackberry like designs make it quite clear that RIM was Google's target, not Apple. But iPhone knocked RIM into irrelevance before Android got sucessful, and in order to be successful they had to change from copying RIMs designs to copying Apple's designs.
And now, as I said, All iPhones still use Google services, but not all Androids do. A massive own goal for Google.
I have yet to find a single app on any platform worth even $1 to me.
The platform you use is Android. And that's a damning statement of the poor quality of apps on Android right there. I've found lots of apps worth paying for on iOS.
Even if Microsoft had a 90% profit margin on the Kin it would still have been a failure. So yes, profit is irrelevant.
Profit margin is not the same as profit.
But what is your point anyway? That Android will disappear just like the Kin and the TouchPad?
I wasn't pursuing any point in particular. Just pointing out the falsehood of your statement that it's irrelevant from a user's perspective how much profit a company makes.
PROBABLY facilitated? You don't know what you re talking about. All the software that is on a new iPhone is there because Apple put it there.
Apple is open about the data sent back home and asks the user at setup time whether he wants to do that. Apple have done nothing wrong. But whoever put that software on the Andorid certainly did do wrong. They neither informed the users, nor give them the option to disable it. These are not equivalents.
Any pure carrier-free phone whether its Android, WinMo or plain old feature phone does not have this spyware period.
You don't know that. And even if it were the case it doesn't change matter for the majority of Android phones that are in fact carrier subsidised.
It doesn't matter if people know their phone runs Android or not. The fact is that people are buying more Android, therefore they prefer it.
Or they like the colour of the case. Or the wallpaper the carrier put on it. Or the price. Or it's the one the salesman pushed them. I'm sorry but it's ridiculous to say that people who don't even know what Android is bought their phone because they like Android.
That depends. If I'm in a first person shooter, I most certainly do want a good emulation of glass in the windows. If I'm using a loope in an application, then I certainly do want a good emulation of a glass magnifer. And in a GUI, if you want to indicate that a button is clickable, it's best to give it some kind of 3D effect so it looks like a physical button. And a glass effect can be part of that.
But I assume you're talking about glass borders around windows on the Windows OS. In which case I agree. But that's just bad taste on Microsoft's part - it's not an indication that we don't benefit from the powerful PCs we have now.
You seem to be confused about Google's business model. It's not irrelevant to them if 200 companies can outsell the iPhone - that's a hell of a lot of phone users looking at Google ads.
Not all Androids have Google as their default search engine. Yet all iPhones have Google as their default search engine. So how is Google winning by people buying Android rather than iPhone?
Slashdot Mirror
If walled gardens completely take over then all entertainment software / content will be developed by a small cliche of companies and you will have to accept what ever they decide to produce.
The reality contradicts your theory. There are 121,000 companies and individuals with apps published on the iPhone App Store.
Which is all well and good until you decide you want to watch a DVD or play a DRMed file for which the gardener didn't feel support was acceptable.
All a real user cares about is watching the content. (S)he doesn't care what format it's in. Why would a provider of content not release content in a format that Apple devices support? They might not support Apple devices if they are trying to make some sort of ideological point. But if they actually want as many people as possible to see the content, they will release in a format or formats that cover all the big platforms.
I could spend days writing about why windows is shit. And I probably have done over the years. It comes into two categories:
1) The designers of the Windows UI have no taste.
2) The architecture behind Windows is flawed.
Now I'm not going to bore myself repeating things I've complained of before, so here's a new one. I haven't touched Windows for a couple of years, but I had to use someone else's PC yesterday and had to copy a directory. A dialog comes up and the most prominent, eye catching thing is an animation of a page in space, doing some rotations and then resting back in the same place in space. Repeated over and over. An animation that serves no purpose whatsoever, is not representative of the action that is happening, and is so busy it distracts the eye from the things that are giving information. It certainly does not have the purpose of showing that something is happening. There's already a real progress bar already that has a built in pulse animation to reassure that the task is progressing.
Why is it there? Because Windows has always had an animation there, since Windows 95. But back then, it was less in your face, and actually gave a clue and some reassurance as to the operation taking place. A page used to go from somewhere to somewhere else. Over the years that animation has grown bigger and more distracting, and less meaningful.
That animation is nothing more than distracting bling. It breaks fundamental rules of UI design. And it shows bad taste.
Now that my be just one small thing, albeit in a central OS interaction. But when using Windows I find these annoying things during every single task. The UI is awful.
And just a quick one on the architecture side: The Registry is a fundamentally misguided idea. This huge data structure that no one piece of software is responsible for. It grows and grows until the computer starts to slow to a crawl. At that stage it either needs expert and time consuming surgery. Or more commonly, someone needs to waste a day reinstalling the OS and all the important apps. The registry is probably the worse architectural decision I've ever seen in any OS.
As you don't have an iOS device, it's doubtful that you ever seriously looked.
But there's a bigger thing here. It appears you use "the free alternatives" on Android, which means that you do use apps, but you don't consider them to be worth $1. One can only conclude that you don't value your time as worth much either.
You really are a bad loser, aren't you sonny.
My problem with Windows was never that it wasn't open source. My problem with Windows is that it is shit. That's also my problem with Android.
Great for you. Even if my data was slightly wrong for your particular country, you still proved my point
No, I proved your point wrong.
the vastly superior Galaxy S2
You say it's superior. My friend has one, and it's a piece of shit. He uses it for a sat-nav for example, and it's forever misleading him on where to go. And sometimes it just hangs. And on occasions he's asked me to do something with it because h's driving, I've found that the UI is awful.
and you're a fraud and a shill.
Except for the fact that I'm right, and I gave the links to prove it. You're a bad loser, sonny.
Unless you donate every penny you make above the poverty line to someone who would otherwise die, you're just as guilty as they are.
What a world of extremes you do live in. A binary world where everything is all equally one thing or all equally another thing. A world where a child stealing candy is as guilty as an armed robber.
It's also a tu quoque fallacious argument. What I do bears no relation to the question of whether it's evil to let people die in order to maximise profits. The rights and wrongs of the drug companies don't rely on what BasilBrush gets up to. But it's even worse than that because you have no idea what I do anyway.
I think my duties to other human beings are limited - I don't think that the fact that people starve, or die of cholera, or have repressive governments, means that we shouldn't have movies, music, or Disney World.
I don't either. And that has nothing to do with the point I made.
You have this odd focus on murder, as though the gradations of killing another person and making more money are equivalent. The drug companies do offer life-extending compounds, but unless you already lead a rich-country lifestyle they're astonishingly unlikely to do much for you.
Waiving patent rights on the various anti-AIDS drugs for people in Africa would make a huge difference. It would save the lives of countless people. It would still allow the drugs companies to make their profits in the developed countries of the world. They don't do it because they can make a little more profit selling to the few in Africa who can afford it. That's evil. And nothing you've said is a valid argument to say it isn't. And nothing you can say is a valid argument that it isn't.
No really, too much choice *is* a bad thing. And when I say too much choice, depends what it is, but more than two choices can be too much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice
That would be the AT&T version of the iPhone not the Verizon version apparently according to Verizon.
To the best of my knowledge there is a single OS image per device. So all iPhone 4 units have Carrier IQ and all iPhone 4S units don't have it. Regardless of which carrier. Though perhaps it's coded to it only actually runs when on some carriers and not on others.
I think killing people is acceptable too, in certain circumstances. There are always dividing lines.
I'm afraid the "where is the dividing line?" argument is as fallacious as the "who's the arbiter?" argument. It's a variant of the slippery slope fallacy.
In order to actually make a real argument, you have come up with a reason why it's OK to let people die in order to make more profits. Because that is undeniably what happens.
But that ca't be true, because we already know that iPhone has a Carrier IQ client on it, and Verizon issues that.
Somebody spoke too soon.
ummmm....who cares? i'm no more interested in paying $1 to $10 for a crappy iOS app than I would be to pay it for a crappy Android applet.
I'm not interested in paying for shit either. I look at the reviews and videos and just buy the decent stuff. But it goes further than that. I'm not interested in using shit even if it's free. And a hell of a lot more free stuff is shit than commercial stuff. Desktop Linux for example is one of the biggest piles of shit there is. You're more than welcome to it.
If that's so then it would have been dead easy for you to provide a citation rather than criticise him for not supplying one when you didn't either.
Absolutely. That's why I quoted the Dhrystone benchmark rather than MIPS in countering his claim.
Apple's been good for the Music industry. Before Apple, the music industry had failed many times to sell music downloads. And Apple got to where there are in music sales by innovating and being the best.
Likewise Apple's been good for Google. As I said, iPhone has always used their search. And ships with clients for their maps and YouTube too. And as things were, as long as Google remained the highest quality suppliers, that wouldn't have changed. Heck, Apple was so solid in their relationship with Google they even had Google's CEO on their board of directors.
The truth is that Android was never intended to combat Apple. Development started way before the iPhone came out. And the then Blackberry like designs make it quite clear that RIM was Google's target, not Apple. But iPhone knocked RIM into irrelevance before Android got sucessful, and in order to be successful they had to change from copying RIMs designs to copying Apple's designs.
And now, as I said, All iPhones still use Google services, but not all Androids do. A massive own goal for Google.
You saying that that I'm the arbiter, isn't actually a valid argument. It's easy to see this by substituting a different evil:
"The difference between good and evil is what you decide is murder?
Hopefully you can see that that question isn't actually an argument that murder isn't evil.
You lose, sucker.
No Contract iPhone 4 8GB $549
No Contract Galaxy SII 16GB $552.45
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone/iphone4
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-i9100-Unlocked-Smartphone-Touchscreen/dp/B004QTBQ2C
I have yet to find a single app on any platform worth even $1 to me.
The platform you use is Android. And that's a damning statement of the poor quality of apps on Android right there. I've found lots of apps worth paying for on iOS.
Even if Microsoft had a 90% profit margin on the Kin it would still have been a failure. So yes, profit is irrelevant.
Profit margin is not the same as profit.
But what is your point anyway? That Android will disappear just like the Kin and the TouchPad?
I wasn't pursuing any point in particular. Just pointing out the falsehood of your statement that it's irrelevant from a user's perspective how much profit a company makes.
PROBABLY facilitated? You don't know what you re talking about. All the software that is on a new iPhone is there because Apple put it there.
Apple is open about the data sent back home and asks the user at setup time whether he wants to do that. Apple have done nothing wrong. But whoever put that software on the Andorid certainly did do wrong. They neither informed the users, nor give them the option to disable it. These are not equivalents.
Any pure carrier-free phone whether its Android, WinMo or plain old feature phone does not have this spyware period.
You don't know that. And even if it were the case it doesn't change matter for the majority of Android phones that are in fact carrier subsidised.
It doesn't matter if people know their phone runs Android or not. The fact is that people are buying more Android, therefore they prefer it.
Or they like the colour of the case. Or the wallpaper the carrier put on it. Or the price. Or it's the one the salesman pushed them. I'm sorry but it's ridiculous to say that people who don't even know what Android is bought their phone because they like Android.
That depends. If I'm in a first person shooter, I most certainly do want a good emulation of glass in the windows. If I'm using a loope in an application, then I certainly do want a good emulation of a glass magnifer. And in a GUI, if you want to indicate that a button is clickable, it's best to give it some kind of 3D effect so it looks like a physical button. And a glass effect can be part of that.
But I assume you're talking about glass borders around windows on the Windows OS. In which case I agree. But that's just bad taste on Microsoft's part - it's not an indication that we don't benefit from the powerful PCs we have now.
At the end of the day, RISC was a way to get cheaper megahertz (and later, gigahertz).
No, RISC was a way of preforming an instruction in less cycles. More MIPS, not more MHz.
There's a reason why a 16MHz 68000 can still run circles around a 100MHz ARM
It can't. Back then a common benchmark was the Dhrystone benchmark. It took a 20Mhz 68020 to match an 8Mhz ARM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second
And of course not only is RISC faster for a given clock speed, it also consumes less power. Which is the reason ARM is the most popular CPU now.
You seem to be confused about Google's business model. It's not irrelevant to them if 200 companies can outsell the iPhone - that's a hell of a lot of phone users looking at Google ads.
Not all Androids have Google as their default search engine. Yet all iPhones have Google as their default search engine. So how is Google winning by people buying Android rather than iPhone?