Except Tivo wasn't a patent troll - they actually produced a best-of-class product that the courts agreed was being infringed on. I know patent litigation is unpopular (and for good reason), but Tivo appeared to be a case where it was Working As Intended.
We'll see with Microsoft, although the timing is certainly suspect.
That's why they can build better cars at a far lower cost than their American competitors can, for example.
Ahh I was somehow under the false impression that they were able to make cheaper cars due to lower wages, less environmental regulations, and the lack of labor unions.
In Japan and South Korea? Are you joking? These countries are the very essence of technology-driven.
No, it really wasn't, because the 90's were when Microsoft's dominance was on the upswing and they seemed invincible. (Windows 3.1, 95, NT4, Office 95, IE, etc). Now they're slipping on many fronts (Windows Vista, IE marketshare, Office 11, Silverlight, WMP/WMV/Zune, etc). They haven't lost yet, but only because they have so far to fall.
Seriously, the only bright spots for Microsoft this decade where they've improved over last are the Windows Server line and the XBox.
Why? This is about tower congestion, which has been overwhelmingly caused by data traffic. An iPhone can easily use the same data traffic in a minute loading a couple web pages that a dumbphone user consumes in a month.
There's a reason smartphones are considered separately from "traditional" handsets - they function very differently, and are used very differently. Not all problems, issues, or marketshare battles make sense across the two groups.
And where do you get that conclusion? Given that the 3GS was released midway through the period, and the 3G was MUCH more popular than the original (no app store with the original, as well as - of course - 3G), it's entirely plausible that the top phone on that chart is indeed the iPhone 3G.
But the overall point is well-taken - while the iPhone may be a popular device, it's by no means #1 given the existing base of Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Other. Yet.
Oh stop trotting this bullshit out. That does not mean they must pursue money to the exclusion of all else. As Apple amply shows, you can approach that from many different angles. Looking at Google's stock price, I'd have to be quite happy with them as an investor, if money is the only object.
Also don't forget that many times investments in public companies are made not to make money, but to guide corporate direction (for better or worse). Money is NOT the only purpose of a public corporation.
Cookies are used to keep track of a user's session, especially when it crosses a load balancer and gets sprayed to any number of identical servers. Without the cookies, there is no way to keep your session on a consistent web server throughout a session. Remember things like "www3.netscape.com"? Cookie-based load balancers are what fixed that situation.
Yes, cookies are abused by advertisers, but quite frankly, I don't give a damn if a site wants to use them to follow me on their site. They DO use them to see which products are popular, what items are considered together - valid data that lets them make business decisions. I know from working with web design firms that they can be used to track flows through a site and tell what parts of navigation are difficult, and if users are missing the "intended" way of using a site.
There are lots of valid technical uses for cookies. I've never understood why they're vilified. It's a tiny chunk of usually random/hash data that's put on your computer by the remote site. Why should you care if they then retrieve it? The only objectionable use is cross-site cookies used by advertisers, and most decent browsers let you disable that class of usage, but not the rest.
So... you ran out of diskspace during the install. Certainly the installer should be far more robust and avoid such "partial installs" in the first place, but ultimately it's a very simple root cause.
This does give me pause about upgrading my own Eee though, as I'd completely forgotten that my OS drive was 4GB.
Or maybe they optimized the kernel for SSE4? All Macs do SSE4 - the Atom doesn't. Perfectly reasonable, yet people always jump to the malicious explanation...
Whereas I advocate the opposite, as disk space is cheap, and you really don't want to go to the hassle of ripping all of those CD's again. But to each their own.
Grand Central is not introducing multithreading - it's introducing comprehensive thread management. So, how many threads are you going to spin for that task? Too many, and you waste a lot of time on thread management and preemption. Too few, and you have processors sitting idle. Now how will you handle this with multiple CPU's? Multiple cores? Hyperthreading? Different cache amounts and layout? OpenCL and GPU processing? Do you know what the rest of the operating system is doing to plan appropriately?
In short, your program can at best make a stab at these issues, and possibly even do a reasonable job if you put a lot of time, effort, and profiling into it. Or you could just use GCD, and let the framework handle it all for you, regardless of whether you're on a Core Solo Mac Mini or a Mac Pro with mutliple OpenCL graphics cards.
It's good stuff. And Apple gave it to the community (much like WebKit enhancements, launchd, etc).
No, for many people, there are no alternatives. I'm really glad for you that you have them, but others do not, and acting as if this is an imaginary problem is not helping.
"a competitor might be able to gain some traction... I would start my own community ISP buying and reselling raw bandwidth"
Or... just make it so that predatory practices don't occur in the first place. And are you completely unfamiliar with barriers to entry? Have fun laying out your new distribution network for your ISP - because clearly you're not going to use existing rights of way, as those are only open to you because of dirty, nasty regulations.
"Market based solutions are not always swift, but they are usually better than legal based ones."
Ah yes - please tell that to laborers in China or India, where such solutions don't exist. Or take a look at Dickensian times, when they didn't exist in the West either. Capitalism drives a lot of personal innovation, but also rewards selfish influences (to put it mildly).
Except there have been plenty of abuses, and typically at the last mile where there is no competition. If your area is only served by one pipe, good luck "routing around" that.
It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media
It's most visible because it was radically different from other platforms and single-handedly changed the market. Go ahead, show me 3D gaming on phones before the iPhone. For that matter, look at phone interfaces, capabilities, and internet usage on them before the iPhone. The iPhone raised the bar, and very little has caught up with it yet. State of the art used to be Windows Mobile 6 and PalmOS - yes, Palm OS. Windows Mobile has blown it ever since, LiMo never went anywhere, and Google Android and Palm Pre very likely would not have been developed if the iPhone hadn't radically changed the market. It gets recognition for that, and it's well-deserved.
sales figures show a different story
Really? It's at 23% in the US, and 14% worldwide. And it only came out two years ago, with its famously limited capabilities at the time.
Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones
Yeah, that worked out so well on Windows and the PC world. Multiple vendors never makes things Just Work - it's the antithesis of it. Protocol incompatibilities, inconsistent hardware support, no platform direction.
Look at Apple. For example, they want to support something like OpenCL. They make sure their hardware has the proper GPU's, the OS supports it, GrandCentral is created, the compiler toolchain adds blocks, and oh yeah, they've been working on LLVM/Clang for years. NONE of that happens when you have a heterogeneous environment and no one is coordinated. Apple wants to get rid of legacy ports and bus systems - so they do it. In two years, Apple abandoned floppies, SCSI, ADB, serial, NuBus, etc. Here we are over ten years later and PC's STILL have PS/2 ports and serial ports, right next to USB 3.0. Such progress.
Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.
I'm sorry - you can't possibly compare Java Midlets to iPhone applications. Nice that it has two-billion phones. I'd bet that a fraction of a percent of those users have ever cared that it's there, and those that have used it (like I used to on my PalmOS Treo - KMaps and Opera Mini) can easily see what crap it is. Ugly, slow, non-native, battery-hungry, low-performance - that's Java on a phone, and one of the reasons it's not on the iPhone. Ditto for Flash, really.
Sadly, the only thing in your post that made any sense was that Apple should be more open. And it's "should", as in it would be nice. The market has shown that they certainly don't "need" to.
This is essentially how it works on any platform you're hacking. You can release all the open-source bits, modifications, and instructions you want (modified roms, killhdinitrd, dsmos), but the minute you combine that with proprietary software (Google Apps, Tivo software, Mac OS X DVD's), you're in hot water. So the usual result is anyone who wants to remain legitimate distributes only the modifications, and allows users to bring in the proprietary bits themselves. It's worked well, and keeps everything legally clean. Perhaps a little more work for the end user, but hacking has never been point-and-click.
Tivo hacking, Mac OS X hacking, now GooglePhone hacking. No different.
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Except Tivo wasn't a patent troll - they actually produced a best-of-class product that the courts agreed was being infringed on. I know patent litigation is unpopular (and for good reason), but Tivo appeared to be a case where it was Working As Intended.
We'll see with Microsoft, although the timing is certainly suspect.
That's why they can build better cars at a far lower cost than their American competitors can, for example.
Ahh I was somehow under the false impression that they were able to make cheaper cars due to lower wages, less environmental regulations, and the lack of labor unions.
In Japan and South Korea? Are you joking? These countries are the very essence of technology-driven.
NAT is not security. A firewall is. Learn the difference.
[i]No, I'm not Black, Asian, Latino - I'm a mongrel mixed breed. I can badmouth ALL the ignorant bastids, 'cause I'm related to them.[/i]
No, you're just an ignorant asshole diverting a good discussion into your filth.
The whole point of those ads is to point out the flaws in Windows that people take for granted, and say "it doesn't have to be that way".
No, it really wasn't, because the 90's were when Microsoft's dominance was on the upswing and they seemed invincible. (Windows 3.1, 95, NT4, Office 95, IE, etc). Now they're slipping on many fronts (Windows Vista, IE marketshare, Office 11, Silverlight, WMP/WMV/Zune, etc). They haven't lost yet, but only because they have so far to fall.
Seriously, the only bright spots for Microsoft this decade where they've improved over last are the Windows Server line and the XBox.
"same thing with Apple. when people got viruses pirating some Mac software it was their fault"
Or it would be, if that had ever actually happened.
"a lot of the old time Mac fanboys are noticing and complaining"
Such as?
Seriously, how did parent get modded up?
Why? This is about tower congestion, which has been overwhelmingly caused by data traffic. An iPhone can easily use the same data traffic in a minute loading a couple web pages that a dumbphone user consumes in a month.
There's a reason smartphones are considered separately from "traditional" handsets - they function very differently, and are used very differently. Not all problems, issues, or marketshare battles make sense across the two groups.
And where do you get that conclusion? Given that the 3GS was released midway through the period, and the 3G was MUCH more popular than the original (no app store with the original, as well as - of course - 3G), it's entirely plausible that the top phone on that chart is indeed the iPhone 3G.
But the overall point is well-taken - while the iPhone may be a popular device, it's by no means #1 given the existing base of Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Other. Yet.
Oh stop trotting this bullshit out. That does not mean they must pursue money to the exclusion of all else. As Apple amply shows, you can approach that from many different angles. Looking at Google's stock price, I'd have to be quite happy with them as an investor, if money is the only object.
Also don't forget that many times investments in public companies are made not to make money, but to guide corporate direction (for better or worse). Money is NOT the only purpose of a public corporation.
Patch 3.3 comes out Tuesday.
No one has sold an 800x480 netbook in 18 months. All of them are 1024x600 or 1366x768.
Kerry was beaten, and the four years prior weren't exactly rosy.
We've had a two party system for well over a hundred years. Just how long a view do you want to take?
I'm not arguing it's the way it should be, but I am arguing that no, you're not going to change it.
Of course, the fact that these opinions have turned out to be legally sound and correct should be disregarded, hmm?
Cookies are used to keep track of a user's session, especially when it crosses a load balancer and gets sprayed to any number of identical servers. Without the cookies, there is no way to keep your session on a consistent web server throughout a session. Remember things like "www3.netscape.com"? Cookie-based load balancers are what fixed that situation.
Yes, cookies are abused by advertisers, but quite frankly, I don't give a damn if a site wants to use them to follow me on their site. They DO use them to see which products are popular, what items are considered together - valid data that lets them make business decisions. I know from working with web design firms that they can be used to track flows through a site and tell what parts of navigation are difficult, and if users are missing the "intended" way of using a site.
There are lots of valid technical uses for cookies. I've never understood why they're vilified. It's a tiny chunk of usually random/hash data that's put on your computer by the remote site. Why should you care if they then retrieve it? The only objectionable use is cross-site cookies used by advertisers, and most decent browsers let you disable that class of usage, but not the rest.
So... you ran out of diskspace during the install. Certainly the installer should be far more robust and avoid such "partial installs" in the first place, but ultimately it's a very simple root cause.
This does give me pause about upgrading my own Eee though, as I'd completely forgotten that my OS drive was 4GB.
Wait, did you say everything went smoothly except you didn't have sound or video ?
That right there is why Linux hasn't gone mainstream.
Or maybe they optimized the kernel for SSE4? All Macs do SSE4 - the Atom doesn't. Perfectly reasonable, yet people always jump to the malicious explanation...
Whereas I advocate the opposite, as disk space is cheap, and you really don't want to go to the hassle of ripping all of those CD's again. But to each their own.
Grand Central is not introducing multithreading - it's introducing comprehensive thread management. So, how many threads are you going to spin for that task? Too many, and you waste a lot of time on thread management and preemption. Too few, and you have processors sitting idle. Now how will you handle this with multiple CPU's? Multiple cores? Hyperthreading? Different cache amounts and layout? OpenCL and GPU processing? Do you know what the rest of the operating system is doing to plan appropriately?
In short, your program can at best make a stab at these issues, and possibly even do a reasonable job if you put a lot of time, effort, and profiling into it. Or you could just use GCD, and let the framework handle it all for you, regardless of whether you're on a Core Solo Mac Mini or a Mac Pro with mutliple OpenCL graphics cards.
It's good stuff. And Apple gave it to the community (much like WebKit enhancements, launchd, etc).
No, for many people, there are no alternatives. I'm really glad for you that you have them, but others do not, and acting as if this is an imaginary problem is not helping.
"a competitor might be able to gain some traction... I would start my own community ISP buying and reselling raw bandwidth"
Or... just make it so that predatory practices don't occur in the first place. And are you completely unfamiliar with barriers to entry? Have fun laying out your new distribution network for your ISP - because clearly you're not going to use existing rights of way, as those are only open to you because of dirty, nasty regulations.
"Market based solutions are not always swift, but they are usually better than legal based ones."
Ah yes - please tell that to laborers in China or India, where such solutions don't exist. Or take a look at Dickensian times, when they didn't exist in the West either. Capitalism drives a lot of personal innovation, but also rewards selfish influences (to put it mildly).
Except there have been plenty of abuses, and typically at the last mile where there is no competition. If your area is only served by one pipe, good luck "routing around" that.
It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media
It's most visible because it was radically different from other platforms and single-handedly changed the market. Go ahead, show me 3D gaming on phones before the iPhone. For that matter, look at phone interfaces, capabilities, and internet usage on them before the iPhone. The iPhone raised the bar, and very little has caught up with it yet. State of the art used to be Windows Mobile 6 and PalmOS - yes, Palm OS. Windows Mobile has blown it ever since, LiMo never went anywhere, and Google Android and Palm Pre very likely would not have been developed if the iPhone hadn't radically changed the market. It gets recognition for that, and it's well-deserved.
sales figures show a different story
Really? It's at 23% in the US, and 14% worldwide. And it only came out two years ago, with its famously limited capabilities at the time.
Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones
Yeah, that worked out so well on Windows and the PC world. Multiple vendors never makes things Just Work - it's the antithesis of it. Protocol incompatibilities, inconsistent hardware support, no platform direction.
Look at Apple. For example, they want to support something like OpenCL. They make sure their hardware has the proper GPU's, the OS supports it, GrandCentral is created, the compiler toolchain adds blocks, and oh yeah, they've been working on LLVM/Clang for years. NONE of that happens when you have a heterogeneous environment and no one is coordinated. Apple wants to get rid of legacy ports and bus systems - so they do it. In two years, Apple abandoned floppies, SCSI, ADB, serial, NuBus, etc. Here we are over ten years later and PC's STILL have PS/2 ports and serial ports, right next to USB 3.0. Such progress.
Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.
I'm sorry - you can't possibly compare Java Midlets to iPhone applications. Nice that it has two-billion phones. I'd bet that a fraction of a percent of those users have ever cared that it's there, and those that have used it (like I used to on my PalmOS Treo - KMaps and Opera Mini) can easily see what crap it is. Ugly, slow, non-native, battery-hungry, low-performance - that's Java on a phone, and one of the reasons it's not on the iPhone. Ditto for Flash, really.
Sadly, the only thing in your post that made any sense was that Apple should be more open. And it's "should", as in it would be nice. The market has shown that they certainly don't "need" to.
This is essentially how it works on any platform you're hacking. You can release all the open-source bits, modifications, and instructions you want (modified roms, killhdinitrd, dsmos), but the minute you combine that with proprietary software (Google Apps, Tivo software, Mac OS X DVD's), you're in hot water. So the usual result is anyone who wants to remain legitimate distributes only the modifications, and allows users to bring in the proprietary bits themselves. It's worked well, and keeps everything legally clean. Perhaps a little more work for the end user, but hacking has never been point-and-click.
Tivo hacking, Mac OS X hacking, now GooglePhone hacking. No different.