It seems reasonable to expect given a long history that all of these vendors will show off a bunch of stuff to get us all excited, and then go back to their offices and have a long chat with some rather persuasive gentlemen from Santa Clara and Redmond. And then they'll run into unanticipated difficulties in production that prevent them from shipping more than a few hundred units.
And then Google will go "Oh, screw it." and launch the thing on their online store and reap the billions of dollars from an eager world clamoring for this hot new technology.
You can expect a press conference in a few days with The Asus board chairman flanked executives from Intel and Microsoft declaring "Non-Windows OS on a non-Intel system? We don't see a future in that." Meanwhile he'll be furtively gesturing pleas for help, but noone will notice.
What incentive could they offer for scientists who crave discovery and publication to go and live behind the Great Firewall? They must be sellng it hard.
I don't care about these problems. They'll work it out.
Google is selling this phone because it advances the technology and their phone partners wouldn't sell it. Expect them to sell an Android + Snapdragon slate for the same reasons. The top 5 OEMs have had that for a year and still no products - ASUS even pulled their Snapdragon netbook in the middle of last year's Computex, some say because Microsoft told them to, and now they "see no future in it":
But the company quickly put the project on the back burner, refusing to discuss it days later at a press event that featured Asustek's chairman alongside executives from microprocessor maker Intel and OS giant Microsoft.
All the major vendors have had this platform for a long time and they wouldn't sell it for strategic reasons. Google isn't submarining them - they declined their first refusal options. Dell had 3" and 5" models ready in September, and didn't launch for the pivotal Christmas season - there's a video of a guy with three thumbs playing with it but I can't find it right now.
Dell, HP, and other top-tier OEMs have announced Snapdragon + Android smartbooks, netbooks, phones and slates, but they will never ever come to market branded by a top tier OEM because of the leverage that Intel and Microsoft are applying to prevent it.
If the incumbents won't give us progress, Google will: even if they have to enter new lines of business to do so. I doubt Google can avoid selling enough units to encourage adoption of modern open technologies in phones, considering they've got the best online ad placement there is.
I doubt Google even wants to sell phones - I think they just want to get the new good technologies adopted so that people can get used to Internet everywhere quicker. This serves their bottom line because when most people use the Internet they use Google services, which Google sells ads on. You can't very well sell Internet ads to be viewed by people who aren't close to a browser. I'm in favor of this because open platforms with internet access everywhere always on let me do things I couldn't do before. I'm also in favor because less power burned is good for CO2 emissions. It also lets me afford to put some high tech shiny stuff under the tree to impress the youngsters.
Intel and Microsoft are scared to death of Snapdragon and Android, and they should be - they don't have offerings like this, and the buzz about cheap, go-everywhere always on low-power application rich platforms that don't use their products is evidence that if they won't innovate in the way that we want, they're done. We want progress, and progress isn't about the widget - it's about the people and what they can do with it. If they try and leverage their market position to kill this progress the truth will out and they will be beset with lawsuits and it will do them no good because there are manufacturers and vendors like HTC and Google who are not afraid of them.
Their best bet: surf the wave. Get their products in line with current demand. Or go away.
Here's a nice old story about a Microsoft software user that got audited, sued, fined and dragged through the press. Apparently they sell guitars. Of course a loss for somebody is naturally a win for somebody else.
You have really bashed Google pretty well the last few days.Some of it is deserved although harsh. One thing I would like you to keep in mind is that your articles have consistantly been featured highly on the Google News web page. That is why I like Google and trust Google.
The complaints in the article and on the support website are ordering and delivery issues, like "Why can't I get a family package?" and "Why is it $100 extra if I'm already a T-Mobile customer?" and "How/when can I order this from Kushanbe, Tajikistan?" Other issues I saw there today were along the lines of people freaking out because they'd ordered the phone three hours ago and it wasn't delivered yet. About 10 percent of the posts are from one guy who goes on and on about how he ordered the phone and then cancelled his order four hours later because of the lousy service, he was never charged, and I guess he's trying to get Google to apologize for dashing his hopes of SuperPhone Nirvana by trollbombing their support website. Perhaps 1 percent of the comments were by or about people who had actual problems with actual phones.
Until the customers actually have the phone there's little that phone company or phone manufacturer support can do.
We have a massive fiber network. It's mostly dark to keep up the scarcity myth. They don't have broadband in Boise. Boise is on the Oregon Trail. The packets from Finland that come to my house at 50mbps flow through a fiber that goes right through the heart of downtown Boise. The only reason there could possibly be for this is that they make more money by not making the drops available.
I know, it's not relevant to your comment. I've got to put it somewhere.
The tablet that Steve Ballmer announced in partnership with HP in his CES keynote speech will never see the light of day. It is vaporware. It does not exist. Steve-o panicked and held up a half-working concept prototype because he's scared spitless about both the Android tablets working on display at CES and Apple's announcement later this month.
There is no such thing and there will never be. It sucks so much power you need a 3 pound power brick to work it at all. It sucks juice like a diabetic 300LB hummingbird. If it was impressive he would have showed you how it worked. Microsoft is looking around for an answer to Android on Snapdragon and to be blunt, they're still going to be looking at Christmas time when you're putting those cool new Android tablets/music players/movie players/Kidsafe GPS locators/notepad computers under the tree for your kids, your spouse and yourself.
In 2010 Microsoft's innovations are going to be limited to paying people to force you to use Bing instead of allowing you to Google what you want. That's all. And in fact TFA announces just that.
Open source is a process where I write code to scratch my itch and out of the generousness of my heart set my code for itch scratching free for use and modification by others. Other people have a similar itch to mine, but not quite the same - and adapt my code to their needs. In time when my itch has erupted into full blown psoriasis I find they've turned my itch scratcher into a cure and so I get in the end the benefit not just of my own effort but also of theirs.
If from experience I can predict the outcome from my own contribution I'm not even being generous -- I'm being as greedy as I can be by leveraging the power of a global network of thinkers to solve my problems present and future, for free.
Let's look for a company outside the usual group that's active in open source not for altruistic reasons, but for basic capitalistic reasons. We need look no further than HTC. They make a lot of these Android devices, including Droid and Nexus One. Their market capitalization today is $282B. They're bigger than Microsoft or Apple or HP or IBM. They don't have to care about these little squabbles and they don't.
It was Glory Road. It was very educational. In it the Galactic Empress' commonest answer to every problem was: do nothing. Almost all problems solve themselves in time, given a wide enough view.
Well worth reading for this and a number of other reasons. It's the best representation of the "stream of consciousness" narrative I've seen, and it's a sexy good story. Actually I have a copy - and no, you can't borrow it. I wouldn't mind seeing what James Cameron could do with it.
You've got to give the Dean credit: whether it was stealing plot elements like the indifference of immortals to the travails of mortals or calculating orbits, the man was not afraid to do his homework.
/ Still hopes Hollywood stays away from Stranger in a Strange Land until I'm dead. I would have to go see it, and what they do to it would be sad.
Let's ignore for a moment that "perpetual" is moot because copyrights are only granted for "limited times," and so "perpetual licenses" are not possible. Licenses to the use of copyrighted material can only be for as long as the duration of the copyright.
So who would stand up to defend the "perpetual" nature of indefinitely temporally defined licenses. Let's see, there's the MPAA, the RIAA, Microsoft, and every other major corporation that's built their business on this principle. FOSS has nothing to worry about in this regard. I seriously doubt some lawyer could stand up in court and say that licenses are implicitly not for the duration of the copyright without some serious opposition. It would be an interesting fight, though. Might the heirs of long dead authors and artists win back control of their ancestral works in this way? As copyright lengthens from six to sixty generations we may see this fight some day.
It's nice to see you post in a normal vein for a change. I appreciate the effort. We're almost there. Now find the topic and put some part of it in your comment and we can discuss the issues of the day. I think that would be fun.
I agree with you about some stuff - host files in particular. I block a lot of hosts in my DNS, and a have masked out large parts of the IP space in my router as well. In addition to avoiding much of the unpleasantness of malware and worms I consider the lack of ads on my Internet a benefit.
But you need to seriously dial back the whole megalomania deal if you can - it's not helping. I'm going to disagree with you about some stuff and you're just going to have to deal with that if we're to have a civil internet relationship.
It would be something to see. Maybe we should get behind it for the lulz. Except for the fact that the whole "spending money not building it" meme in this thread is the literal truth.
We already have hot air column generating power stations. They're called geothermal plants.
A sign bearing the subject line, "Los Angeles City Limits" was stolen from the border of LA and hung by the side of the road in my home town in Bishop, CA some 260 miles away. It stood there several years. It was a political statement of the political reach of the LA Department of Water and Power, which at that time extended to leeching every drop of water our of our formerly verdant vally - an engineering feat that required making water run uphill for several miles. Apparently since then the limit has stretched to Arizona.
To the point of your post: if the LA city limits don't yet extend all the way to DC, I misdoubt they will soon.
Personally I prefer injecting a volcano with water and driving a turbine with the steam. Apparently these days they're using sewage effluent instead of water, which prevents river pollution as a fringe benefit. No, you don't really need a volcano, but you do need something like it for geothermal energy to work.
It's cheaper than coal (3.5c vs 5.5c/KWh), doesn't get in the way, has minimal pollution issues compared to other systems. And it's available 24/7. Geothermal provides the US with 3,040MW of energy now, and nearly 4,000MW more are in development. While this is a tiny fraction of the current electricity generation there's no reason why we can't do more of it. Wind power by comparison generates 10 times as much power and is claimed to cost "less than 5c/KWh" and DOE claims that up to 20% intermittent wind power can be integrated to the grid for as little as 0.5c/KWh additional.
As further fringe benefits the dry steam produced can be used in Hydrogen production, as a heat source for homes and greenhouses, and in other manufacturing or agricultural processes. We're not really getting everything we can out of the geothermal steam that's generated now.
On the downside the East coast of the US is out of luck unless they drill deep, because they're seriously lacking in subsurface temps.
Came here to say this. Optimization will of course involve painting the rocks on the ground under the greenhouse black - or putting it on a region that's already dark colored.
Doubtless on its way up that hot air column will also absorb H2O - a potent greenhouse gas, carrying it quite high. There could be some interesting electrostatic effects as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems reasonable to expect given a long history that all of these vendors will show off a bunch of stuff to get us all excited, and then go back to their offices and have a long chat with some rather persuasive gentlemen from Santa Clara and Redmond. And then they'll run into unanticipated difficulties in production that prevent them from shipping more than a few hundred units.
And then Google will go "Oh, screw it." and launch the thing on their online store and reap the billions of dollars from an eager world clamoring for this hot new technology.
You can expect a press conference in a few days with The Asus board chairman flanked executives from Intel and Microsoft declaring "Non-Windows OS on a non-Intel system? We don't see a future in that." Meanwhile he'll be furtively gesturing pleas for help, but noone will notice.
According to Alexa, Google.com is the #1 site on the internet for traffic, Baidu is #8.
Thank you. That is indeed the video. For those afraid of the link shorteners, here is a direct link.
What incentive could they offer for scientists who crave discovery and publication to go and live behind the Great Firewall? They must be sellng it hard.
I don't care about these problems. They'll work it out.
Google is selling this phone because it advances the technology and their phone partners wouldn't sell it. Expect them to sell an Android + Snapdragon slate for the same reasons. The top 5 OEMs have had that for a year and still no products - ASUS even pulled their Snapdragon netbook in the middle of last year's Computex, some say because Microsoft told them to, and now they "see no future in it":
But the company quickly put the project on the back burner, refusing to discuss it days later at a press event that featured Asustek's chairman alongside executives from microprocessor maker Intel and OS giant Microsoft.
All the major vendors have had this platform for a long time and they wouldn't sell it for strategic reasons. Google isn't submarining them - they declined their first refusal options. Dell had 3" and 5" models ready in September, and didn't launch for the pivotal Christmas season - there's a video of a guy with three thumbs playing with it but I can't find it right now.
Dell, HP, and other top-tier OEMs have announced Snapdragon + Android smartbooks, netbooks, phones and slates, but they will never ever come to market branded by a top tier OEM because of the leverage that Intel and Microsoft are applying to prevent it.
If the incumbents won't give us progress, Google will: even if they have to enter new lines of business to do so. I doubt Google can avoid selling enough units to encourage adoption of modern open technologies in phones, considering they've got the best online ad placement there is.
I doubt Google even wants to sell phones - I think they just want to get the new good technologies adopted so that people can get used to Internet everywhere quicker. This serves their bottom line because when most people use the Internet they use Google services, which Google sells ads on. You can't very well sell Internet ads to be viewed by people who aren't close to a browser. I'm in favor of this because open platforms with internet access everywhere always on let me do things I couldn't do before. I'm also in favor because less power burned is good for CO2 emissions. It also lets me afford to put some high tech shiny stuff under the tree to impress the youngsters.
Intel and Microsoft are scared to death of Snapdragon and Android, and they should be - they don't have offerings like this, and the buzz about cheap, go-everywhere always on low-power application rich platforms that don't use their products is evidence that if they won't innovate in the way that we want, they're done. We want progress, and progress isn't about the widget - it's about the people and what they can do with it. If they try and leverage their market position to kill this progress the truth will out and they will be beset with lawsuits and it will do them no good because there are manufacturers and vendors like HTC and Google who are not afraid of them.
Their best bet: surf the wave. Get their products in line with current demand. Or go away.
Here's a nice old story about a Microsoft software user that got audited, sued, fined and dragged through the press. Apparently they sell guitars. Of course a loss for somebody is naturally a win for somebody else.
Google Ignoring Criticism Of Nexus One Distribution.
Then read the first comment:
You have really bashed Google pretty well the last few days.Some of it is deserved although harsh. One thing I would like you to keep in mind is that your articles have consistantly been featured highly on the Google News web page. That is why I like Google and trust Google.
Priceless! (No, it wasn't me.)
Nope, it's available to ship to any address within United States.
Or Singapore, Hong Kong or the UK initially.
The complaints in the article and on the support website are ordering and delivery issues, like "Why can't I get a family package?" and "Why is it $100 extra if I'm already a T-Mobile customer?" and "How/when can I order this from Kushanbe, Tajikistan?" Other issues I saw there today were along the lines of people freaking out because they'd ordered the phone three hours ago and it wasn't delivered yet. About 10 percent of the posts are from one guy who goes on and on about how he ordered the phone and then cancelled his order four hours later because of the lousy service, he was never charged, and I guess he's trying to get Google to apologize for dashing his hopes of SuperPhone Nirvana by trollbombing their support website. Perhaps 1 percent of the comments were by or about people who had actual problems with actual phones.
Until the customers actually have the phone there's little that phone company or phone manufacturer support can do.
We have a massive fiber network. It's mostly dark to keep up the scarcity myth. They don't have broadband in Boise. Boise is on the Oregon Trail. The packets from Finland that come to my house at 50mbps flow through a fiber that goes right through the heart of downtown Boise. The only reason there could possibly be for this is that they make more money by not making the drops available.
I know, it's not relevant to your comment. I've got to put it somewhere.
The tablet that Steve Ballmer announced in partnership with HP in his CES keynote speech will never see the light of day. It is vaporware. It does not exist. Steve-o panicked and held up a half-working concept prototype because he's scared spitless about both the Android tablets working on display at CES and Apple's announcement later this month.
There is no such thing and there will never be. It sucks so much power you need a 3 pound power brick to work it at all. It sucks juice like a diabetic 300LB hummingbird. If it was impressive he would have showed you how it worked. Microsoft is looking around for an answer to Android on Snapdragon and to be blunt, they're still going to be looking at Christmas time when you're putting those cool new Android tablets/music players/movie players/Kidsafe GPS locators/notepad computers under the tree for your kids, your spouse and yourself.
In 2010 Microsoft's innovations are going to be limited to paying people to force you to use Bing instead of allowing you to Google what you want. That's all. And in fact TFA announces just that.
Open source is a process where I write code to scratch my itch and out of the generousness of my heart set my code for itch scratching free for use and modification by others. Other people have a similar itch to mine, but not quite the same - and adapt my code to their needs. In time when my itch has erupted into full blown psoriasis I find they've turned my itch scratcher into a cure and so I get in the end the benefit not just of my own effort but also of theirs.
If from experience I can predict the outcome from my own contribution I'm not even being generous -- I'm being as greedy as I can be by leveraging the power of a global network of thinkers to solve my problems present and future, for free.
Let's look for a company outside the usual group that's active in open source not for altruistic reasons, but for basic capitalistic reasons. We need look no further than HTC. They make a lot of these Android devices, including Droid and Nexus One. Their market capitalization today is $282B. They're bigger than Microsoft or Apple or HP or IBM. They don't have to care about these little squabbles and they don't.
After all, the sun is nuclear energy, and oil is just that stored.
But fooling with the exchange rates of solar energy to hot air do troubling things to long term models of air temperatures.
Green energy plants in Minnesota to generate cheap heat and light: $7 billion.
Plane tickets, Minneapolis St. Paul to Phoenix departing tomorrow: $147 each or $767,397,771 for all 5,220,393 residents of Minnesota.
I'm going to channel Sam Kinnison here: "Move to where the warm is!" You are dangerously close to Canada.
It was Glory Road. It was very educational. In it the Galactic Empress' commonest answer to every problem was: do nothing. Almost all problems solve themselves in time, given a wide enough view.
Well worth reading for this and a number of other reasons. It's the best representation of the "stream of consciousness" narrative I've seen, and it's a sexy good story. Actually I have a copy - and no, you can't borrow it. I wouldn't mind seeing what James Cameron could do with it.
You've got to give the Dean credit: whether it was stealing plot elements like the indifference of immortals to the travails of mortals or calculating orbits, the man was not afraid to do his homework.
/ Still hopes Hollywood stays away from Stranger in a Strange Land until I'm dead. I would have to go see it, and what they do to it would be sad.
It's an interesting point.
Let's ignore for a moment that "perpetual" is moot because copyrights are only granted for "limited times," and so "perpetual licenses" are not possible. Licenses to the use of copyrighted material can only be for as long as the duration of the copyright.
So who would stand up to defend the "perpetual" nature of indefinitely temporally defined licenses. Let's see, there's the MPAA, the RIAA, Microsoft, and every other major corporation that's built their business on this principle. FOSS has nothing to worry about in this regard. I seriously doubt some lawyer could stand up in court and say that licenses are implicitly not for the duration of the copyright without some serious opposition. It would be an interesting fight, though. Might the heirs of long dead authors and artists win back control of their ancestral works in this way? As copyright lengthens from six to sixty generations we may see this fight some day.
Yeah, who needs compilers that make the best code they can, phones that don't crash and know what year it is? Who needs free software when you can patent software licensing itself?
Let us instead ignore the freedom of the platform and look at the Oooh shiny.
It's nice to see you post in a normal vein for a change. I appreciate the effort. We're almost there. Now find the topic and put some part of it in your comment and we can discuss the issues of the day. I think that would be fun.
I agree with you about some stuff - host files in particular. I block a lot of hosts in my DNS, and a have masked out large parts of the IP space in my router as well. In addition to avoiding much of the unpleasantness of malware and worms I consider the lack of ads on my Internet a benefit.
But you need to seriously dial back the whole megalomania deal if you can - it's not helping. I'm going to disagree with you about some stuff and you're just going to have to deal with that if we're to have a civil internet relationship.
It would be something to see. Maybe we should get behind it for the lulz. Except for the fact that the whole "spending money not building it" meme in this thread is the literal truth.
We already have hot air column generating power stations. They're called geothermal plants.
A sign bearing the subject line, "Los Angeles City Limits" was stolen from the border of LA and hung by the side of the road in my home town in Bishop, CA some 260 miles away. It stood there several years. It was a political statement of the political reach of the LA Department of Water and Power, which at that time extended to leeching every drop of water our of our formerly verdant vally - an engineering feat that required making water run uphill for several miles. Apparently since then the limit has stretched to Arizona.
To the point of your post: if the LA city limits don't yet extend all the way to DC, I misdoubt they will soon.
Personally I prefer injecting a volcano with water and driving a turbine with the steam. Apparently these days they're using sewage effluent instead of water, which prevents river pollution as a fringe benefit. No, you don't really need a volcano, but you do need something like it for geothermal energy to work.
It's cheaper than coal (3.5c vs 5.5c/KWh), doesn't get in the way, has minimal pollution issues compared to other systems. And it's available 24/7. Geothermal provides the US with 3,040MW of energy now, and nearly 4,000MW more are in development. While this is a tiny fraction of the current electricity generation there's no reason why we can't do more of it. Wind power by comparison generates 10 times as much power and is claimed to cost "less than 5c/KWh" and DOE claims that up to 20% intermittent wind power can be integrated to the grid for as little as 0.5c/KWh additional.
As further fringe benefits the dry steam produced can be used in Hydrogen production, as a heat source for homes and greenhouses, and in other manufacturing or agricultural processes. We're not really getting everything we can out of the geothermal steam that's generated now.
On the downside the East coast of the US is out of luck unless they drill deep, because they're seriously lacking in subsurface temps.
Came here to say this. Optimization will of course involve painting the rocks on the ground under the greenhouse black - or putting it on a region that's already dark colored.
Doubtless on its way up that hot air column will also absorb H2O - a potent greenhouse gas, carrying it quite high. There could be some interesting electrostatic effects as well.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all