(It doesn't help to see Jeff Waugh being all complainy on Mark's blog, either.)
He does the same thing on Aaron's blog, only a bit worse - drives the whole discussion off-topic with blathering about timelines and who said what at a conference three years ago and such... He was very good at destroying a conversation and degenerating it into an I said-He-said flamefest with personal insults directed at just about anyone who disagreed with him or who tried to get the conversation back on topic. Ironic, isn't it? He just proves the exact issues and points both Mark and KDE devs have with GNOME (specifically, the lack of cooperation on fd.o standards).
Aaron Seigo also has his say on this topic - collaboration's demise scroll down to see comments from Shuttleworth and others. Quite nice, some entertaining (in a sad way) flamewar towards the end... I do believe aseigo has a point there, and provides lots of specific examples where collaboration was refused for no good reason. Some juicy bits from the comments:
also, this is not an odd "oops, we just didn't get around to it" event on the part of GNOME: how's that job D-Bus implementation in GNOME 3 coming? you know, the one that needlessly duplicates the one KDE implements, which we actually designed with thought of cross-project use including getting some feedback from non-KDE devs? or how about the screensaver D-Bus API which we implemented specifically with collaboration with GNOME devs at SUSE, only later to have GNOME not implement it and then complain to us that it used the org.freedesktop namespace? or how about how GNOME devs specifically blocked the formation of a common git repository for fd.o specs, and then when there was finally agreement (after an in-person meeting) insist on implementing it themselves, ignoring that repo had already been started but by people with @kde.org email addresses, and then after taking months to eventually duplicate that effort not implement the most critical part of it: the metadata?
Once again, they don't operate in the US only. When a US based company operates (provides services) in another country, they must follow that country's laws. That's the actual point you fail to understand... repeatedly.
Well, I don't want to leave the impression I support the subpoena. I don't, and I believe it is correct for Twitter to fight it.
But be that as it may, if Twitter is a US company, based in the US, it is subject to US law. The EU can butt out.
If the US objected because of French subpoena served against a French company, operating in France, can you imagine the uproar?
Twitter is not operating in the US only, and it is reasonable to expect a foreign company that operates in your country to follow your country's laws. For example, let's say there's a US company that provides dancing underage boys as sex slaves for wealthy customers. Now that might be legal in the US, but I'm not sure they could operate in any country they choose to where slavery is illegal... just saying...
So lets just post all the nuke launch codes to wikileaks too, how bout that? After all, there shouldnt be ANY secrets in the government!
That's bullshit, Assange himself said on numerous occasions that he does think that governments, like any large organizations, do need to have secrets.
That's the bitterest post I've read in months! Cool..
OMG, I'm scared to death that they are going to start charging me for this stuff. But, but, but, wait a minute, I only look at my Facebook page once every couple of weeks, certainly don't use it as a twitter substitute (which I also don't use). I only rarely look at a YouTube Video and am unlikely to download NetFlix videos over the net until they support Linux. And then there is the fact that I've only got a Net10/LG NTLG300GB cell phone without one of those fancy displays that is on an expired usage contract [1].
So as far as I can tell, the only "newsworthy" aspect of this is that the evil phone companies are attempting to tax (cough extort) money from those wealthy enough to own (or have a contract) that supports a "fancy phone" habit and/or those who have nothing better to do than waste time updating their Facebook pages or watching NetFlix on their phone [2].
God, I hope that some liberal congressperson gets wind of this and arm twists the FCC to stop this evil corporate activity which would apparently discriminate against those in the 10-20 y.o age group.
My net. This appears to be a "lottery"-like tax on those who don't have better things to do with their time/money. YMMV.
1. Means I have to go down to Walmart or BestBuy and buy some minutes to reactivate it.
2. Because surveys have found that most "engineers" (aka those who have better things to do with the time like actually build something) view Facebook as a complete waste of time and the only Netflix videos they are interested in watching would be the new update to Tron to see if it lives up all the money being spent advertising it.
They probably just don't want to worry about getting sued.
I think I heard that line before... And then APPLE went after HTC waving ridiculous software patents, while their buddies at Microsoft covered the other big player: Motorola. Oracle is attacking Google directly...
This is both scary and fascinating at the same time. I cannot help but feel excited about the idea put forward at LeWeb:
Mayer said Google is looking at what she called "contextual discovery" as a way to evolve search - pushing information out to people before they've started to look for it, based on factors such as their web browsing history or current location.
"We're starting to play around with some new concepts in how to find information," she said. "Can we take location and a user's context and figure out what piece of information they need? It's kind of search without search.
Mayer sees this push or pre-emptive search as a complement to traditional web browsing, perhaps living in a panel on a web browser offering users another way to discover relevant or timely data.
She said social recommendations will be a key part of this next generation of search - the company launched a Social Search feature in 2009 - while location-enabled mobile devices offer even more scope for Google to "figure out what the next most useful piece of information is" and push it out to the user.
"If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said.
[...]
She added: "The idea is to push information to people."
I believe this can be incredibly useful and cool. It's kinda futuristic too... Like walking around in a new city, stopping at a sign written in Chinese, wondering what the hell is that... and in the few seconds it takes to look at your mobile the info would be already. Other contextual information as you turn around your phone (similar somewhat to Layar on Android but more useful). This is what innovation is about it... but than we're on slashdot.. We all know that this would aslo mean massive personal data-mining, something we're not usually comfortable with (to put it in really diplomatic terms)...
I think "western values" are too loaded, as you say, it often implies Judeo-Christian underpinnings. Question is, can we define universal human values, and if so, what rights and wrongs should we include. Years back I read a book by Emmanuel Levinas. The most difficult book I ever read in my life. He tried to define the very basics of ethics, that is, the desire to do good (the desire to do good is a simple definition of ethics, but it's harder to define the specifics).
One thing that Levinas defines as universally bad is "causing suffering and humiliation" (unwanted of course, BDSM folks are obvious exceptions). But in this case, this is not enough. One might claim that the offending facebook post caused him undue mental torment. Levinas also has a positive definition of ethics. As I said, "Totality and Infinity" is one of the most difficult books I ever read, so this short summary doesn't do justice for its complexitiy and richness. However, I'll try.
Basically, he says that we have to have an infinite desire for the Other - which includes the desire for the Other's otherness as well. Sounds redundant, I know, but bear with me for a moment. This desire has two components, one is the desire to know (that is, basic human curiousity) and the other is the desire to preserve the otherness of the Other. An opposing movement is what he calls a totalizing movement. He defines it by the presumption that we can have total knowledge of the Other, that is, we can strip the Other of all it's secrets, achieving a total knowledge of the other (therefore robbing it from it's very otherness: once we believe that our knowledge of the other is Total, the image we have and It becomes the same). At this point he introduces the metaphor of the Face of the Other, and the movement towards the other as communication (we question the other to know more). In fact, he says that this otherness is the very basis of communication - once the Other has no secrets, there isn't much to talk about. Therefore we question the Other to know more (curiousity) but also question the totality of our knowledge at every point, simultaneously possessing the desire to preserve some measure of otherness.
I know all this seems far fetched, but the point, I believe, is that curiousity is one leg on which ethical behaviour stands on, the other being not only a respect for the otherness of the Other, but even love for this otherness, that feeds back to our own curiosity, keeping the discourse on going. The first step of every authoritarian entity is to deny the possiblity of discourse, to forbid language so to speak, the very means by which otherness can be expressed, approached, and cherished.
Levinas himself was religious (jew) - but interestingly, according to his own tenets, one can deduce that religions in general are totalizing - they do not allow for an infinite universe. Well, of course I don't know all religions, but let's just say that all religions that pose an entity that possesses a totality of knowledge, an All Knowing God are by nature totalizing. In an infinite universe, such totality is impossible. In fact, the very definition of infinity is something beyond (+1), something that is not part of the totality of any system. The Other's secret that must be preserved as well as approached via discourse.
Anyway, I'm not sure this all makes sense to anybody, but if you want to read an intellectually challenging book, I highly recommend Totality and Infinity. As far as I know, it's one of the very few attempts to define ethics in absolute terms... most of what we consider "western values" are relativistic, their truth(s) easily traced back to a very specific context, to an ontology.
Exactly my thoughts here - when it comes to price. I wrote that review specifically for Vietnamese students (tried to simplify the language as well as the issues I touch upon). The prices set by the publishers for the digital versions is just fucking ridiculous. The average salary around here is $300/month, but even if that was not the case, 13-15$ for a shitty novel by Danielle Steel? WTF?? Give me out of copyright classics for $1 (already freely available, but I would pay for the convenience of a one stop shop), $2-3 for contemporaries, $5 at most for real gems - and I wouldn't bother with piracy. Of course I know the reason for these (probably don't want to compete with their own established traditional distribution chains, ie dead tree book business), but that's besides the point.
Also, the stuff I wrote about e-ink vs. LCD - I know that many would find no difference between the two technologies, in other words, some people can read just fine on an LCD. I'm not one of them. For me, e-ink is far more pleasant to look at. Moreover, I started to go out for reading to breath a bit of fresh air and just be outside - sitting on the terrace of a cafe, in a park, on the beach beneath a shade... and that's where e-ink readers really shine and LCDs, including the iPAD, sucks balls. Indoors, in dim light/no light LCDs have an advantage, but I still find it better to use my Sony Reader with a lamp than reading on a screen with backlight.
My girlfriend had the same reaction when I showed her my Nexus One, or rather, Android. She has a 3GS, wants something with Android next, not necessarily something like the Nexus (she said the design is too manly, wants something more girlish - she has good taste though, so I'm not talking about pink with cute cats, rather something a bit slimmer, in white or maybe silver color).
I agree completely with your post. I just wanted to add that probably iOS as an immediate choice for developers already developing for it. The App Store is pretty much close to being saturated, for a developer just starting out, it is harder to make an impact or get noticed. I'd say that for new developers the fact that Android has fewer apps might actually be an advantage besides having roughly the same market share (or at least being in the same ballpark).
The situation is a bit different - Java ME was never free in the way Android is. Additionally, the underlying systems were truly different, using custom dumbOSs on each model that had very very little in common. Regardless of the customizations done by carrier's in Android's case (ie SenseUI), the Dalvik VM is the same on all phones. Lastly, I just given you an example where developers claim that it's fun to code for Android while showing that their app runs of 100 different Versions and 244 different hardware. So yeah, I laugh it off...
Your last statement is true on one hand, and is completely irrelevant on the other. The advantage of Android is that you don't need a major carrier to carry your app. You can post it in the market that offers the most users/best conditions. You can post it outside the market, on your own website. You can ask people to test it on message boards. In other words, this time we not only have free distribution channels, there are free distribution channels competing for developer attention.
That explains a lot (slashdot anti-AT&T posts, other complaints). Well, the iPod touch might work for you and then you don't need a smartphone. Unless you are specifically looking for something android. In that case, I would regularly check xda-developers to see which handsets are hacked, which have plenty of custom ROMs available for. CyanogenMod runs on a number of handsets (nighties built on Froyo 2.2) - and it's very well tested, some people swear by it against any vendor supplied ROM. Gotta admit thought that most of those handsets are either new and top end or old. Still, might find something interesting there -www.cyanogenmod.com - check the Changelog to see what's supported.
I meant not in the US. I can't say I have a firm grasp of how the mobile market works over there, but it seems pretty fsckd up. Can you buy an unlocked iPhone and sim card for Verizon? I think that's how it works anywhere else. I live in Saigon, I picked up a Nexus in a small shop near my house. Korean version with the SLCD screen (which I like better than the AMOLED anyway) and Froyo by default. The N1 was just recently launched in Korea (this July).
Sorry I can't help you... If you are into thinkering, and want something like the N1, try the HTC Desire - I heard the hardware is very very similar, and it's pretty hackable. You can load up Android vanilla on it, or any custom ROM you can find on xda-developers.
These standards create better products that are deemed superior. Once that catches on, then others trying to compete will HAVE to match those standards in order for them to sell. This is a good thing for everyone. For example, Japanese cars were (and some still argue are) far superior than US cars. In order to stay in business US car manufacturers HAD to improve their design and quality standards to even compete with the Japanese. Now, US cars are much better quality than they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s and this is a good thing for everyone.
While we are at cars, lets take the analogy a bit further. What if American manufacturers, instead of competing and trying to improve their products, started litigating against Japanese companies, asking the courts to ban imports of cars with infringing technologies. What if the courts granted their requests. Fast forward to today's patent wars. APPLE wants HTC gone from the US market. Nevermind that HTC was first one of the first companies to develop wireless touch devices, and that they designed the Palm Treo 650 and the iPaq, built the first WinMo phone, built the first Windows Mobile 3G phone, built the first 4G phone (close to two years ago)...
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that Apple found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to compete - the first time in over two years - which is a HUGE time frame in such a fast moving market. Their reaction to the emerging Android and other platforms?
1) Tried to enforce an EULA on their SDK that would have prevented developers coding apps for multiple platforms. That failed after a massive backlash, so next
2) They sued NOKIA (have no clue why, NOKIA has no big presence in the US market), than they sued HTC over ridiculous software/ideas patents, which is just a proxy attack on Android. Their buddies at MS sued the other successful Android handset developer, Motorola, but again, the main target here is Android.
3)????
Not sure what (3) is going to be. Part of me wishes that the courts granted everything Apple dreams of. Go ahead and remove all HTC (Android) phones from the US market. Bye bye EVO, Desire, etc. Remove all NOKIA. Remove all the Droids. Remove all INSERT NEXT APPLE LITIGATION TARGET HERE. Then see how happy customers are with their limited choices on top of the already ridiculous carrier lock-ins.
Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers.
I find it very difficult to believe that the man who has presided over Apple's astonishing march back into relevancy over the last couple decades could possibly be labeled "a mistake".
Steve Jobs is a minimalist, heavy-handed, hard-driving, design-obsessed prick?!? Not exactly news.
And I'll say it once again. Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people and Apple is all about hiring designers and marketers ("Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company," as he says), it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on/. and Apple so celebrated. You would think the opposite would be true here. Are we still longing to sit at the cool kids' table or something, or have we just bought into that "lifestyle" shit too?
Well, there is more to the interview than that, although I'd say yours is a fair summary. Still, I'd recommend everyone RTFA, it's an interesting, deeply personal account of the way Jobs works, and the reasons for Apple's phenomenal success. It is even more interesting how Jobs has changed in the past few years compared to Scully's account. One point that stands out in this interview is Jobs rejection of looking at anything the competition does, or others do in general. Yes, he had his own heroes like Akio Morita and SONY, but generally he was far less obsessed with what others do than today.
His attack on Android in the latest quarterly earnings press conference was positively hysteric:
"We think Android is very, very fragmented"
"We think integrated will trump fragmented"
"... we will triumph over Google's fragmented approach"
"...where PCs have the same interface, Android is very fragmented
The new bogeyman: fragmented FRAGMENTED FRAGMENTED!!!
There's a nice spin in there. At any given time, all important apps will be present in all markets (or at least the top three markets). What really happens here is that markets are actually forced to compete with each other a) for developers b) for users (markets that would demand exclusivity would simply die, even if anyone was stupid enough to pull something like that). This is good news for everyone, and the antithesis of everything Apple stands for. No matter how much he SJ tries to spin it, fragmentation is not a problem. Here's another real jam, the app itself (TweetDeck) was discussed earlier here on Slashdot.
"Twitter client, Twitter Deck [sic], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers a daunting challenge." Steve Jobs
Here is what the developers had to say about Jobs' remark:
Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing for Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't."
Indeed I recall reading their blog post about this, and the tone was more along the lines of "look how cool it is that TweetDeck runs on the craziest, wackiest combinations of ROMS and hardware. Looking at the list, it's amazing indeed (10 NOKIA N900, and even a few iPhone 3GS... wtf?).
I believe you can use the Nexus without a simcard, and have access to the Market, youtube, etc. via WiFi. Not sure though... As to where can you buy unlocked phones - I'd say anywhere else. I don't think buying subsidized phones is a good idea anyway, you will pay the full price anyway (hidden in your subscription fees), sometimes even more than that. It's like buying a phone on credit - bad habit (generally, buying things on credit).
You make a good argument there, shitty programmers may have been a little overboard. To tell you the truth, based on the title of the summary I expected another bogeyman fragmentation article. Actually, the blog post is quite cool, some interesting statistics there, and no whining! Still, I strongly disagree with the general point that fragmentation is a big problem in the grand scheme of things. Even if developers leave the platform in droves (the opposite seems to be happening actually) - there will still be enough talent left to develop for Android and the vast majority of its users.
You're right about Google Goggles of course, but I have to question the quality of the phones you mentioned. Sanyo is a good name (they make excellent refrigerators, I own one) - though not sure about the quality of their phones. Don't know much about Kyocera. However, incompatibilities are to be expected with a completely open system like Android. Basically, any Chinese mom & pop shop can assemble hardware capable of running Android for 30$ - will those handle an app like Google Goggles? Probably not. But this is unavoidable.
Now I don't mean to take a jibe at your choice of phones, please don't misunderstand me. A lots of cool apps depend on numbers. Others are useful if your whole family runs Android (latitude for example can be extremely useful in situation where you are likely to get lost, separated, etc). The same functionality exists on iOS of course, but than you need to shell out $$$ for each member of your family. That is the beauty of Android, you can get high-end phones like the Nexus or the Desire (still considerable cheaper than the iPhone4 - unlocked, unsubsidized price of course), and you can get a handset for $200. Probably less. But between the absolute low end and the high-end phones, you have a choice, and if you research your options carefully, you may be able to find a fully capable phone that runs Android very well. The market right now is pretty much chaotic, hard to choose. But sooner or later a small manufacturer, or perhaps one of the big ones (I think LG is working on a sub $200 Android phone) will come up with a series of cheap phones that work very well with Android, supporting all the features that make it a good mobile OS, including the application stack.
Actually they can handle it. The slashdot summary title is misleading. The blog itself is kinda fun to read. When I read the title, I thought that here we go, another whining developer who cannot handle targeting multiple builds/architecture. Note that I had a WinMo phone before, a HTC Touch HD, and windows phones came on a variety of hardware from different vendors, and in different versions too - yet there was no fragmentation hysteria. Linux works in a similar way, a developer whose app would only work on a given version of a single distribution would be derided by the community if he whined about fragmentation. That said, TweetDeck devs don't whine at all. Read the TFA - they have some really interesting graphs and statistics, while they seem to be kinda proud that their app runs on 244 different handsets and a variety of ROMs, some crazier than others.
Correction - I actually clicked on the link, and TweetDeck is not a random whining programmer. The summary is bad as usual, but for those who didn't read the TFA (just like me at first) - they think it's pretty cool their app runs on 244 different handsets and dozens of different modified/hacked/cooked ROMs of Android. What I said still stands, but TweetDeck is the wrong target, sorry:)
Eventually I just RTFA, yeah yeah I know - and what I said above is not targeted at this particular developer. For those who didn't RTFA, TweetDeck's blogpost only mentions how proud they are that their app runs on over a hundred combinations of hardware and ROM versions. Their app is exactly the kind of example I had in mind for the developers who can do (vs. the devs who just whine).
To be successful on the Market, you need a) good ideas b) programming skills to implement them. There are lots of hugely popular applications on the Android Market that I haven't seen problems reported by users on any handset. Basically, this is the same as with other platforms - Windows, Linux, etc. Linux is a good example.
We have thousands of applications and libraries on Linux. They not only work across different versions of the OS, most of them work across different versions AND different architectures. Now if a programmer releases an app that works only on Ubuntu 9.04 and breaks on every other platform - that's shitty programming, plain and simple. At that point, the programmer can either improve his/her skills, give up on the Linux platform in general, or whine on a blog and get linked on Slashdot (seriously, WTF were the editors thinking?). Android is exactly the same. Except that if the programmer with the broken linux app would whine about fragmentation on his blog, most would ignore him, others would probably flame him to death.
Of course, now we have lots of developers coming from the closed iOS ecosystem, because Android is hot. They were used to developing for a single hardware + OS spec. Most of them get the job done. Some give up. Some throw a tantrum over fragmentation. I have obviously no problem with the first group. I don't have a problem with the second group either. The whiners piss me off, however. It's completely, utterly useless and stupid. Android won't change, and other developers already proved that programming for the platform should not be a problem - provided you have the necessary skills. So shut up and improve your skills or go away, just please don't whine. The Market is booming, if a few dozen programmers leave, that won't affect Android much. There are thousands of developers with the will and the talent to target Android.
Programmers write software for a myriad of different versions of Windows running on thousands of different types of hardware without these QA issues. What is Android doing that causes this problem?
As you probably suspect... nothing. There are thousands of useful apps working on all handsets without problems. I have about 30 installed on my Nexus One, carefully read the user reviews for each on AppBrain, and there is a reason most of these have 4.5+ stars... In other words, there are programmers who can do, and programmers who can whine on their blog. What I don't understand is why Slashdot links to random whining programmer to inflate the issue of fragmentation. Actually, you're right on target with the windows analogy. There are shitty programmers whose apps suffer due to hardware/platform (win7/vista/xp) differences, and then there are apps that work fine across all versions of the OS/hw.
Slashdot Mirror
(It doesn't help to see Jeff Waugh being all complainy on Mark's blog, either.)
He does the same thing on Aaron's blog, only a bit worse - drives the whole discussion off-topic with blathering about timelines and who said what at a conference three years ago and such... He was very good at destroying a conversation and degenerating it into an I said-He-said flamefest with personal insults directed at just about anyone who disagreed with him or who tried to get the conversation back on topic. Ironic, isn't it? He just proves the exact issues and points both Mark and KDE devs have with GNOME (specifically, the lack of cooperation on fd.o standards).
also, this is not an odd "oops, we just didn't get around to it" event on the part of GNOME: how's that job D-Bus implementation in GNOME 3 coming? you know, the one that needlessly duplicates the one KDE implements, which we actually designed with thought of cross-project use including getting some feedback from non-KDE devs? or how about the screensaver D-Bus API which we implemented specifically with collaboration with GNOME devs at SUSE, only later to have GNOME not implement it and then complain to us that it used the org.freedesktop namespace? or how about how GNOME devs specifically blocked the formation of a common git repository for fd.o specs, and then when there was finally agreement (after an in-person meeting) insist on implementing it themselves, ignoring that repo had already been started but by people with @kde.org email addresses, and then after taking months to eventually duplicate that effort not implement the most critical part of it: the metadata?
Once again, they don't operate in the US only. When a US based company operates (provides services) in another country, they must follow that country's laws. That's the actual point you fail to understand... repeatedly.
Well, I don't want to leave the impression I support the subpoena. I don't, and I believe it is correct for Twitter to fight it.
But be that as it may, if Twitter is a US company, based in the US, it is subject to US law. The EU can butt out.
If the US objected because of French subpoena served against a French company, operating in France, can you imagine the uproar?
Twitter is not operating in the US only, and it is reasonable to expect a foreign company that operates in your country to follow your country's laws. For example, let's say there's a US company that provides dancing underage boys as sex slaves for wealthy customers. Now that might be legal in the US, but I'm not sure they could operate in any country they choose to where slavery is illegal... just saying...
So lets just post all the nuke launch codes to wikileaks too, how bout that? After all, there shouldnt be ANY secrets in the government!
That's bullshit, Assange himself said on numerous occasions that he does think that governments, like any large organizations, do need to have secrets.
OMG, I'm scared to death that they are going to start charging me for this stuff. But, but, but, wait a minute, I only look at my Facebook page once every couple of weeks, certainly don't use it as a twitter substitute (which I also don't use). I only rarely look at a YouTube Video and am unlikely to download NetFlix videos over the net until they support Linux. And then there is the fact that I've only got a Net10/LG NTLG300GB cell phone without one of those fancy displays that is on an expired usage contract [1].
So as far as I can tell, the only "newsworthy" aspect of this is that the evil phone companies are attempting to tax (cough extort) money from those wealthy enough to own (or have a contract) that supports a "fancy phone" habit and/or those who have nothing better to do than waste time updating their Facebook pages or watching NetFlix on their phone [2].
God, I hope that some liberal congressperson gets wind of this and arm twists the FCC to stop this evil corporate activity which would apparently discriminate against those in the 10-20 y.o age group.
My net. This appears to be a "lottery"-like tax on those who don't have better things to do with their time/money. YMMV.
1. Means I have to go down to Walmart or BestBuy and buy some minutes to reactivate it. 2. Because surveys have found that most "engineers" (aka those who have better things to do with the time like actually build something) view Facebook as a complete waste of time and the only Netflix videos they are interested in watching would be the new update to Tron to see if it lives up all the money being spent advertising it.
They probably just don't want to worry about getting sued.
I think I heard that line before... And then APPLE went after HTC waving ridiculous software patents, while their buddies at Microsoft covered the other big player: Motorola. Oracle is attacking Google directly...
I believe this can be incredibly useful and cool. It's kinda futuristic too ... Like walking around in a new city, stopping at a sign written in Chinese, wondering what the hell is that... and in the few seconds it takes to look at your mobile the info would be already. Other contextual information as you turn around your phone (similar somewhat to Layar on Android but more useful). This is what innovation is about it... but than we're on slashdot.. We all know that this would aslo mean massive personal data-mining, something we're not usually comfortable with (to put it in really diplomatic terms)...
One thing that Levinas defines as universally bad is "causing suffering and humiliation" (unwanted of course, BDSM folks are obvious exceptions). But in this case, this is not enough. One might claim that the offending facebook post caused him undue mental torment. Levinas also has a positive definition of ethics. As I said, "Totality and Infinity" is one of the most difficult books I ever read, so this short summary doesn't do justice for its complexitiy and richness. However, I'll try.
Basically, he says that we have to have an infinite desire for the Other - which includes the desire for the Other's otherness as well. Sounds redundant, I know, but bear with me for a moment. This desire has two components, one is the desire to know (that is, basic human curiousity) and the other is the desire to preserve the otherness of the Other. An opposing movement is what he calls a totalizing movement. He defines it by the presumption that we can have total knowledge of the Other, that is, we can strip the Other of all it's secrets, achieving a total knowledge of the other (therefore robbing it from it's very otherness: once we believe that our knowledge of the other is Total, the image we have and It becomes the same). At this point he introduces the metaphor of the Face of the Other, and the movement towards the other as communication (we question the other to know more). In fact, he says that this otherness is the very basis of communication - once the Other has no secrets, there isn't much to talk about. Therefore we question the Other to know more (curiousity) but also question the totality of our knowledge at every point, simultaneously possessing the desire to preserve some measure of otherness.
I know all this seems far fetched, but the point, I believe, is that curiousity is one leg on which ethical behaviour stands on, the other being not only a respect for the otherness of the Other, but even love for this otherness, that feeds back to our own curiosity, keeping the discourse on going. The first step of every authoritarian entity is to deny the possiblity of discourse, to forbid language so to speak, the very means by which otherness can be expressed, approached, and cherished.
Levinas himself was religious (jew) - but interestingly, according to his own tenets, one can deduce that religions in general are totalizing - they do not allow for an infinite universe. Well, of course I don't know all religions, but let's just say that all religions that pose an entity that possesses a totality of knowledge, an All Knowing God are by nature totalizing. In an infinite universe, such totality is impossible. In fact, the very definition of infinity is something beyond (+1), something that is not part of the totality of any system. The Other's secret that must be preserved as well as approached via discourse.
Anyway, I'm not sure this all makes sense to anybody, but if you want to read an intellectually challenging book, I highly recommend Totality and Infinity. As far as I know, it's one of the very few attempts to define ethics in absolute terms... most of what we consider "western values" are relativistic, their truth(s) easily traced back to a very specific context, to an ontology.
Also, the stuff I wrote about e-ink vs. LCD - I know that many would find no difference between the two technologies, in other words, some people can read just fine on an LCD. I'm not one of them. For me, e-ink is far more pleasant to look at. Moreover, I started to go out for reading to breath a bit of fresh air and just be outside - sitting on the terrace of a cafe, in a park, on the beach beneath a shade... and that's where e-ink readers really shine and LCDs, including the iPAD, sucks balls. Indoors, in dim light/no light LCDs have an advantage, but I still find it better to use my Sony Reader with a lamp than reading on a screen with backlight.
My girlfriend had the same reaction when I showed her my Nexus One, or rather, Android. She has a 3GS, wants something with Android next, not necessarily something like the Nexus (she said the design is too manly, wants something more girlish - she has good taste though, so I'm not talking about pink with cute cats, rather something a bit slimmer, in white or maybe silver color).
I agree completely with your post. I just wanted to add that probably iOS as an immediate choice for developers already developing for it. The App Store is pretty much close to being saturated, for a developer just starting out, it is harder to make an impact or get noticed. I'd say that for new developers the fact that Android has fewer apps might actually be an advantage besides having roughly the same market share (or at least being in the same ballpark).
Your last statement is true on one hand, and is completely irrelevant on the other. The advantage of Android is that you don't need a major carrier to carry your app. You can post it in the market that offers the most users/best conditions. You can post it outside the market, on your own website. You can ask people to test it on message boards. In other words, this time we not only have free distribution channels, there are free distribution channels competing for developer attention.
That explains a lot (slashdot anti-AT&T posts, other complaints). Well, the iPod touch might work for you and then you don't need a smartphone. Unless you are specifically looking for something android. In that case, I would regularly check xda-developers to see which handsets are hacked, which have plenty of custom ROMs available for. CyanogenMod runs on a number of handsets (nighties built on Froyo 2.2) - and it's very well tested, some people swear by it against any vendor supplied ROM. Gotta admit thought that most of those handsets are either new and top end or old. Still, might find something interesting there -www.cyanogenmod.com - check the Changelog to see what's supported.
Sorry I can't help you... If you are into thinkering, and want something like the N1, try the HTC Desire - I heard the hardware is very very similar, and it's pretty hackable. You can load up Android vanilla on it, or any custom ROM you can find on xda-developers.
These standards create better products that are deemed superior. Once that catches on, then others trying to compete will HAVE to match those standards in order for them to sell. This is a good thing for everyone. For example, Japanese cars were (and some still argue are) far superior than US cars. In order to stay in business US car manufacturers HAD to improve their design and quality standards to even compete with the Japanese. Now, US cars are much better quality than they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s and this is a good thing for everyone.
While we are at cars, lets take the analogy a bit further. What if American manufacturers, instead of competing and trying to improve their products, started litigating against Japanese companies, asking the courts to ban imports of cars with infringing technologies. What if the courts granted their requests. Fast forward to today's patent wars. APPLE wants HTC gone from the US market. Nevermind that HTC was first one of the first companies to develop wireless touch devices, and that they designed the Palm Treo 650 and the iPaq, built the first WinMo phone, built the first Windows Mobile 3G phone, built the first 4G phone (close to two years ago)...
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that Apple found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to compete - the first time in over two years - which is a HUGE time frame in such a fast moving market. Their reaction to the emerging Android and other platforms?
1) Tried to enforce an EULA on their SDK that would have prevented developers coding apps for multiple platforms. That failed after a massive backlash, so next
2) They sued NOKIA (have no clue why, NOKIA has no big presence in the US market), than they sued HTC over ridiculous software/ideas patents, which is just a proxy attack on Android. Their buddies at MS sued the other successful Android handset developer, Motorola, but again, the main target here is Android.
3)????
Not sure what (3) is going to be. Part of me wishes that the courts granted everything Apple dreams of. Go ahead and remove all HTC (Android) phones from the US market. Bye bye EVO, Desire, etc. Remove all NOKIA. Remove all the Droids. Remove all INSERT NEXT APPLE LITIGATION TARGET HERE. Then see how happy customers are with their limited choices on top of the already ridiculous carrier lock-ins.
...but given this statement:
I find it very difficult to believe that the man who has presided over Apple's astonishing march back into relevancy over the last couple decades could possibly be labeled "a mistake".
RTFA - he refers to himself, not Jobs.
Steve Jobs is a minimalist, heavy-handed, hard-driving, design-obsessed prick?!? Not exactly news.
And I'll say it once again. Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people and Apple is all about hiring designers and marketers ("Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company," as he says), it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on /. and Apple so celebrated. You would think the opposite would be true here. Are we still longing to sit at the cool kids' table or something, or have we just bought into that "lifestyle" shit too?
Well, there is more to the interview than that, although I'd say yours is a fair summary. Still, I'd recommend everyone RTFA, it's an interesting, deeply personal account of the way Jobs works, and the reasons for Apple's phenomenal success. It is even more interesting how Jobs has changed in the past few years compared to Scully's account. One point that stands out in this interview is Jobs rejection of looking at anything the competition does, or others do in general. Yes, he had his own heroes like Akio Morita and SONY, but generally he was far less obsessed with what others do than today.
His attack on Android in the latest quarterly earnings press conference was positively hysteric:
"We think Android is very, very fragmented"
"We think integrated will trump fragmented"
"... we will triumph over Google's fragmented approach"
"...where PCs have the same interface, Android is very fragmented
The new bogeyman: fragmented FRAGMENTED FRAGMENTED!!!
There's a nice spin in there. At any given time, all important apps will be present in all markets (or at least the top three markets). What really happens here is that markets are actually forced to compete with each other a) for developers b) for users (markets that would demand exclusivity would simply die, even if anyone was stupid enough to pull something like that). This is good news for everyone, and the antithesis of everything Apple stands for. No matter how much he SJ tries to spin it, fragmentation is not a problem. Here's another real jam, the app itself (TweetDeck) was discussed earlier here on Slashdot.
"Twitter client, Twitter Deck [sic], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers a daunting challenge." Steve Jobs
Here is what the developers had to say about Jobs' remark:
Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing for Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't."
Indeed I recall reading their blog post about this, and the tone was more along the lines of "look how cool it is that TweetDeck runs on the craziest, wackiest combinations of ROMS and hardware. Looking at the list, it's amazing indeed (10 NOKIA N900, and even a few iPhone 3GS ... wtf?).
I believe you can use the Nexus without a simcard, and have access to the Market, youtube, etc. via WiFi. Not sure though... As to where can you buy unlocked phones - I'd say anywhere else. I don't think buying subsidized phones is a good idea anyway, you will pay the full price anyway (hidden in your subscription fees), sometimes even more than that. It's like buying a phone on credit - bad habit (generally, buying things on credit).
You're right about Google Goggles of course, but I have to question the quality of the phones you mentioned. Sanyo is a good name (they make excellent refrigerators, I own one) - though not sure about the quality of their phones. Don't know much about Kyocera. However, incompatibilities are to be expected with a completely open system like Android. Basically, any Chinese mom & pop shop can assemble hardware capable of running Android for 30$ - will those handle an app like Google Goggles? Probably not. But this is unavoidable.
Now I don't mean to take a jibe at your choice of phones, please don't misunderstand me. A lots of cool apps depend on numbers. Others are useful if your whole family runs Android (latitude for example can be extremely useful in situation where you are likely to get lost, separated, etc). The same functionality exists on iOS of course, but than you need to shell out $$$ for each member of your family. That is the beauty of Android, you can get high-end phones like the Nexus or the Desire (still considerable cheaper than the iPhone4 - unlocked, unsubsidized price of course), and you can get a handset for $200. Probably less. But between the absolute low end and the high-end phones, you have a choice, and if you research your options carefully, you may be able to find a fully capable phone that runs Android very well. The market right now is pretty much chaotic, hard to choose. But sooner or later a small manufacturer, or perhaps one of the big ones (I think LG is working on a sub $200 Android phone) will come up with a series of cheap phones that work very well with Android, supporting all the features that make it a good mobile OS, including the application stack.
Actually they can handle it. The slashdot summary title is misleading. The blog itself is kinda fun to read. When I read the title, I thought that here we go, another whining developer who cannot handle targeting multiple builds/architecture. Note that I had a WinMo phone before, a HTC Touch HD, and windows phones came on a variety of hardware from different vendors, and in different versions too - yet there was no fragmentation hysteria. Linux works in a similar way, a developer whose app would only work on a given version of a single distribution would be derided by the community if he whined about fragmentation. That said, TweetDeck devs don't whine at all. Read the TFA - they have some really interesting graphs and statistics, while they seem to be kinda proud that their app runs on 244 different handsets and a variety of ROMs, some crazier than others.
Correction - I actually clicked on the link, and TweetDeck is not a random whining programmer. The summary is bad as usual, but for those who didn't read the TFA (just like me at first) - they think it's pretty cool their app runs on 244 different handsets and dozens of different modified/hacked/cooked ROMs of Android. What I said still stands, but TweetDeck is the wrong target, sorry :)
Eventually I just RTFA, yeah yeah I know - and what I said above is not targeted at this particular developer. For those who didn't RTFA, TweetDeck's blogpost only mentions how proud they are that their app runs on over a hundred combinations of hardware and ROM versions. Their app is exactly the kind of example I had in mind for the developers who can do (vs. the devs who just whine).
We have thousands of applications and libraries on Linux. They not only work across different versions of the OS, most of them work across different versions AND different architectures. Now if a programmer releases an app that works only on Ubuntu 9.04 and breaks on every other platform - that's shitty programming, plain and simple. At that point, the programmer can either improve his/her skills, give up on the Linux platform in general, or whine on a blog and get linked on Slashdot (seriously, WTF were the editors thinking?). Android is exactly the same. Except that if the programmer with the broken linux app would whine about fragmentation on his blog, most would ignore him, others would probably flame him to death.
Of course, now we have lots of developers coming from the closed iOS ecosystem, because Android is hot. They were used to developing for a single hardware + OS spec. Most of them get the job done. Some give up. Some throw a tantrum over fragmentation. I have obviously no problem with the first group. I don't have a problem with the second group either. The whiners piss me off, however. It's completely, utterly useless and stupid. Android won't change, and other developers already proved that programming for the platform should not be a problem - provided you have the necessary skills. So shut up and improve your skills or go away, just please don't whine. The Market is booming, if a few dozen programmers leave, that won't affect Android much. There are thousands of developers with the will and the talent to target Android.
Programmers write software for a myriad of different versions of Windows running on thousands of different types of hardware without these QA issues. What is Android doing that causes this problem?
As you probably suspect... nothing. There are thousands of useful apps working on all handsets without problems. I have about 30 installed on my Nexus One, carefully read the user reviews for each on AppBrain, and there is a reason most of these have 4.5+ stars... In other words, there are programmers who can do, and programmers who can whine on their blog. What I don't understand is why Slashdot links to random whining programmer to inflate the issue of fragmentation. Actually, you're right on target with the windows analogy. There are shitty programmers whose apps suffer due to hardware/platform (win7/vista/xp) differences, and then there are apps that work fine across all versions of the OS/hw.