I'm a die hard "drank the kool-aid" Mac person, but I'd work for Microsoft. I live in Seattle and have lots of friends that have and do work for them and it seems like a good place to work. The corporate culture on the tech side seems very nice: flexible hours, plenty of opportunity to work from home, no dress code, plenty of free drinks in the break areas, "beer fridays", etc. The company does seem to take care of the employees and their needs. There are metro bus lines that run from the various parts of the area to MS and back. The cafeterias are nice and have different stuff so you can head to a different buildings cafeteria if you feel the need for a change. The work doesn't really sound any harder than any other place I hear about, and if they have to let you go, they are usually really kind about it. One friend's group was dissolved but they basically kept her on for two months with the only job duty of looking for internal positions to apply for. There is some orange-blue badge issues between temps and perms but most people are in the position they want. There are plenty of permanent positions if you want to apply for them while a good number of people enjoy the three month break between contacts as a vacation and typically. Rehiring at MS seems to mostly be a function of if you did a good job or not. As a place to work, it seems to be one of the better places around and honestly, their ideology and methods probably aren't any worse than any other large companies.
I'd advise against it. We tried it where I worked. It sounds good to build your own boxes on the cheap, but it rarely works out like that. You build your own computers. The cards (ethernet, video, etc.) you used a few months might not be on sale this month, so you now have multiple versions of cards. If buying them in bulk, the line probably gets refreshed so it's hard to buy the same model of hardware twice. Then, when you have to rebuild an older computer a year or two later, you have to remember where you put those drivers for that particular card that this computer uses. Since it was bought on the cheap, it probably isn't marked very well and unless you had the luxury of looking at the computer before it went down, what model it is might not even be known. Even then, since the hardware was bought cheap, the drivers might not be as easy to get online as one would think, especially if the company isn't around anymore. There is also all sorts of tiny details dealing with this or that hardware that has to be remembered. Then you need storage for all the bits, parts, and driver software. Trying to call in hardware warrantees for the products you buy will usually be much more time consuming than just calling your vendor and having them do everything based on the serial number of the broken computer. In the end, building and maintaining our own computers was way more trouble and man hours than just going with a name brand such as HP or Dell and using their warrantees. Whatever got saved in material costs in building our own computers got more than spent in extra man hours maintaining them.
I didn't think we could produce enough kinetic energy to affect anything large enough to be a threat.
After doing some basic math, I'd have to say you are correct. If we are talking about using a kinetic impact of a 1000 kg payload travelling at 20 km/s (voyager is 721kg and moving at 17 km/s for comparison) into a 6 miles asteroid weighing 1*10^15 kg (some random site on the internet said a 6 mile asteroid would weight 1 millionth the mass of Ceres). Through conservation of momentum, it essentially works out that we have altered the movement of the asteroid by 1.7 mm/day. So if we hit it a year early, it ends up moving less than a meter. If we hit it with a thousand such launches, it ends up moving 620 m which is not even one radius of the asteroid, let alone the earth. If we figure that we can get three order of magnitude (x1000) better results out of technology since the voyager launch in a combination of mass or speed and hit it with a thousand space launches, it still would not clear one radius of the earth if hit a year early.
Similarly, if using atomics a 25 megaton bomb that transfers all of it's energy to moving the asteroid (I would expect even an ideal situation to be somewhere closer to 50% efficiency) will make it move 1.2 km/day for 446 km/year. 10 such bombs would make it clear the earth's radius just barely. 100 would do so by ten earth diameters.
25 to be spent in WHICH music store ? iTunes, Amazon, Napster ?
Knowing France, it will probably only be good at a French government site that only sells music by French bands or sung in French that have been approved by some council of culture.
Android is still in the DOS days. Once Google gets around to learning the same lesson Microsoft learned (albeit slowly) and develops a QA test suite that they administer, the problem will only get worse.
Unfortunately, since Android is open source and released to the wild, they can provide a QA test suite, but they cannot really make people use it. What I think they should have done is continued with the Nexus and provided a constant bar for the other carriers making their own phones with Android to aim for. They had to come out with the Nexus because the hardware from the carriers was lacking. Chances are that now that they've discontinued the Nexus, the carriers will once again lag behind. Nevermind that several of my friends have asked for criteria in a new phone that the Nexus would have fit but nothing else does due to features or carrier, but I had to just tell them they were SOL. Google needs to lead by example with Android, because nobody else will.
Well, AoC's failure was not caused merely by a funding problem.
I'm going to chip in a bit here and say that part of AoC's problem was that it was boring, or at least presented as such. I was at GenCon a few years ago when it was being demoed. AoC had a walled off booth, with booth babes giving away plastic swords, and you had to be 18+ to get in. I waited in line to see it expecting some killer graphics while running around a snake god temple with slave girls chained to the walls and slicing down bad guys. What I got was running around a field and empty village with an occasional bandit that would show up and get killed in an unspectacular couple of strokes. Perhaps the graphics on the grass in that field was really good, but I'm not interested in nice looking grass. I left and told everybody I knew about how boring AoC looked. I'm sure thousands of others from that weekend did the same. I'm not saying the entire game was like that, but if that's what people came up with to display the game in such a venue, I can't really expect that they presented the game that well in any other venue either. Since I bet most MMO sales are from word of mouth from friends, it was still a bad choice.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
I know that Americans feel it dents their national pride to admit it, but the Russians categorically won the space race.
Yes, but it is a good example of winning the battles and losing the war. Where are the USSR now? Gone and surrounded by former Warsaw pact nations that have sided with Western Europe if not actively feuding with Russia. Even the USSR is no longer as they are just "the Russians" as former parts of the USSR have separated to form even more hostile counties on their borders. There were only two really important parts to the Space Race besides the publicity battle and that was for putting satellites up in orbit and to launch ICBMs. We both did the first and nobody did the second. Meanwhile we had the high altitude flying knowledge before hand to run U2 and SR-71 spy missions as well as plenty of bombers based on their border to drop bombs. The only way the Space Race would have been the sole importance in the cold war is if they would have built the missiles and launched them before the US had caught up. In the end, it was an economic battle and they picked all the wrong choices.
Even the Russians themselves weren't as confident as you seem to be. They were convinced they would never be able to deal with fighting on two fronts, against Germany and Japan. They relied on the Chinese to hold off the Japanese. They even pushed the communists in China, who they were supporting, to aid the Nationalists in fighting the Japanese.
The Soviet Union might have made things tough for Germany but I doubt they'd be able to fend them off forever. They were successful specifically because of American involvement.
I'm sorry, I don't think you've ever actually studied WW2 in any detail. Frist, Japan did take on the Soviet Union and got their asses handed to them both times in battles of Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol . They sued for peace and turned their eyes to China. Second, the European theater was completely decided on the Eastern Front. The Germans failed to win at the Battle of Moscow. The Russians had turned everything around by Stalingrad. By time the Battle of Kursk happened, the end of Nazi Germany was written. D-Day and the Western European Front dealt with a forth of the resources that the Germans were throwing at the Eastern Front. If the Allies had not landed in Europe, the Soviet Union would have gone all the way to the sea.
While it may be arguable that the Soviet Union might not have been is such a good spot without Lend Lease and things were touch and go in the early part of the war, they still did the brunt of all the fighting against the Nazis.
Lots of people suggest either turning the monitor vertical or say that there are larger resolution monitors still out there. Yes, there are monitors with more horizontal pixels out there, but they are not like the normal monitors I bought seven years ago that I'm trying to buy new one for, they are usually high priced professional models. I'm having a hard time replacing my 8 year old $150 CRT because nothing new has any better vertical resolution, which is what I'm looking for. I can understand that everything is going towards watching movies, but I also work on my computer. If I'm going to upgrade, I would want better. Even if I rotate the monitor, then my lack of horizontal pixels is making things even worse. In 8 years, despite the change of monitor technology, I would expect a similarly priced monitor to have a better resolution. While they arguably are better for watching movies anyway, it's hard to find one for actually doing work as the typical vertical resolution actually seems to have dropped for similar price ranges.
Which is why you never refuse. You simply forget it. It is not illegal to forget something 50 chars long, it could easily happen.
However, claiming that you forgot when you haven't would probably be perjury. If nobody believes you, including the jury at your perjury trial, it would be illegal whether you actually did forget or not.
I hate coming to the defense of Microsoft, but "CTRL-ALT-DEL" hasn't been a hard-reboot sequence since WinME.
No, but if you computer freezes because of a program, you still hit it to get to task manager to kill the software or reboot. He did say software, not OS. It is also a jab at how often does MS expect their tablets to act like normal computers with normal computer problems. Normal computer tablets have been out there for a long time as others have stated, and no really taken off (I have two dozen deployed to doctors right now, but they could care less that their laptop can also be used as a tablet and usually ask I rebuild without the tablet software to get a little more speed out of what was a poorly performing computer to begin with). Apple and probably the other new comers will be more of an appliance and people expect apps that just work rather than computer programs that freeze occasionally.
An old man, sitting in his couch, watching himself in an old college football match. Repeating over and over the twenty seconds where he scored a touchdown.
But the old man isn't really old. He has a strong, young body. He could stand up and go play another football match. Score another touchdown. But he's too tired, so he'll just play the old tape. Over and over again.
What you're forgetting to mention is that the man was only playing football in college to spite a rival college and that he was funding his entire college team. During that time he scored lots of touchdowns, but only really replays the first one because it was the first, usually at the request of other people from the college. He could do it again, but he'd have to rebuild the league, buy everybody new uniforms, construct a new stadium, all when the inter-college rivalries aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, the man has other hobbies, family, mortgages, and other expenses. He still gets out, plays some sports, and does what he wants to do, and only everybody else who wants him to start a new league team is trying to relive past glories.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked?
Not especially as it means that Apple really isn't worried that much about people hacking them. I'm sure they could make it much harder to hack if they really wanted to.
Except he has yet to have his Cuban Missile Crisis, cause like the Civil Rights Movement to support, create something like the Peace Corp, set a grand goal (and support) for space exploration, etc. For that matter, I don't think he's really given any inspiring speeches since the election. His trial by fire has been the repression, which was and has turned out pretty lackluster. This only real bit of legeslation has been the insurance reform, which hasn't even come into effect yet, and if it does before it gets canned, we'll still have to wait to see if it's actually a good program or not to judge him by. Besides being assassinated, JFK was a strong president that made a lot of decisions in his administration that turned out to be good. For Obama to be like JFK, he's going to have to take the challenges he is being given, the repression, health care, the wars, etc. and actually do something and have it turn out well. Realistically, we won't find out if that's true for another administration or two after he's out of office like any other president.
I don't think you know what you are talking about. The right to bear arms was taken from the UK common law and one of the items of contention between the colonies was that they were taking the colonial arms in a way they couldn't citizens of the UK. It wasn't till after WW1 that the UK started really limiting the ability to bear arms in the UK (because they were afraid people might use them due to civil unrest).
You simply can't save 14 Billion by collecting 659,174-9% per year. Building wealth at that level is all about *hiding* what you really make, and getting taxed on what you can't shelter from the Government tax auditors (i.e. a puny 659k).
Or creating a company and having stock in it that is theoretically worth that much, but isn't income or actual money till you try and sell it.
Living in a state that does have an income tax, I have to say that I don't have much sympathy for the billionaires who are crying over the fact that they might get taxed on the part of their income over $200,000 per year. Aw, isn't that just too bad.
Living in a state that doesn't have income tax, the one we are talking about, I don't believe for a second that that $200,000 figure won't creep lower and lower till we are all paying it. This isn't taxing the rich, it's a trojan horse to sneak in the ability to tax everybody. That's how Washington (the state) does it's politics and power creep. They initiate a law that has a very limited effect, so that it sounds reasonable and is favored by the voting population, then they slowly increase the effect of the law till it affects everybody. It's much easier than just flat out creating a law that affects everybody and would never be put up with by the voting population in one big chunk.
Seriously, 50 a day, what the fuck? Am I alone in feeling this?
Nope. I'm getting old and boring too. My younger friends (20's) will spend much of the time I'm with them getting texts and such. I just can't find the need. Even Twitter is something I have but don't really use or get. (and more than likely, most of those 100 texts a day are cross linked uses of twitter or other apps also.
Again, a project that was way overhyped before any code became available.
Yes, because it is more than just an open source alternative. It is a test bed for crowdsourced project funding. They went on Kickstarter.com and asked for $10,000. They ended up with $200,000 instead. A good number of people with no interest in computers are watching this because if it fails, it would also be a failure for using the internet to raise funds for any project and stifle donations to other projects. If it succeeds, it increases the likelyhood that using sites like Kickstarter is a viable method of not only getting funds but also providing a place to donate funds to projects you support.
I don't understand why Diaspora has had saturation coverage in the mainstream press (and pretty heavy coverage here, for that matter) before it even went alpha, but identi.ca gets so little.
Because a lot of people have their eyes on Diaspora for a variety of reasons. This is not just a test of Diaspora but also Kickstarter which is the fundraising site they used to get the money to make this project. They went on Kickstarter and proposed to write "Diaspora - the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" if they got $10,000 worth of funds. Because Facebook privacy, or lack of it was in the news at the time, they ended up with just over $200,000 in funds from several thousand donators, some who donated more than $2000. The way Kickstarter works is if the level of funding is reached, then the money is with withdrawn and given to the people it was pledged to. If they had gotten the money and never even produced code, it would not only have been a disaster for Diaspora, but also Kickstarter. Now that code has actually be produced and it is open source, it bodes well not just for them but also Kickstarter and using the internet for fund your projects.
Then there is still the core goal of producing that Facebook replacement with privacy in mind. Lots of people want that if only to put pressure on Facebook to pay attention to their own privacy concerns.
Brand loyalty keeps you buying into the ecosystem. HTC is trying to sell you a phone. Right now.
So, what you are saying is that HTC doesn't give a rat's ass about brand loyalty but just wants a quick sale.
Apple's ecosystem has very little to do with it. I have a Mac and iPhone, but have no need for an iPod (iPhone makes it superfluous really even though I was a hold out against using my phone as a music player). However, i have friends who are strongly Windows that are quite happy with their iPhone and have stated they will not go back (after the Sidekick debacle). The well thought out product with the continued support with what generates brand loyalty and gets people to buy other products, not the other way around.
I would say it is a worse model. Maybe not for the manufacturer, but certainly for the user. Some people don't like the walled garden approach from Apple and want a completely open version of a well thought out product with continued support. They want an open brand they can have loyalty in. Unfortunatly, despite that the tools are there with Android, it doesn't appear that anyone cares to step into that market niche. Possibly because if you make a decent phone with continued support and have no other products for people to invest in and feature creep isn't enough to get people who already have your phone to buy a new one, it just doesn't pay off.
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I'm a die hard "drank the kool-aid" Mac person, but I'd work for Microsoft. I live in Seattle and have lots of friends that have and do work for them and it seems like a good place to work. The corporate culture on the tech side seems very nice: flexible hours, plenty of opportunity to work from home, no dress code, plenty of free drinks in the break areas, "beer fridays", etc. The company does seem to take care of the employees and their needs. There are metro bus lines that run from the various parts of the area to MS and back. The cafeterias are nice and have different stuff so you can head to a different buildings cafeteria if you feel the need for a change. The work doesn't really sound any harder than any other place I hear about, and if they have to let you go, they are usually really kind about it. One friend's group was dissolved but they basically kept her on for two months with the only job duty of looking for internal positions to apply for. There is some orange-blue badge issues between temps and perms but most people are in the position they want. There are plenty of permanent positions if you want to apply for them while a good number of people enjoy the three month break between contacts as a vacation and typically. Rehiring at MS seems to mostly be a function of if you did a good job or not. As a place to work, it seems to be one of the better places around and honestly, their ideology and methods probably aren't any worse than any other large companies.
I'd advise against it. We tried it where I worked. It sounds good to build your own boxes on the cheap, but it rarely works out like that. You build your own computers. The cards (ethernet, video, etc.) you used a few months might not be on sale this month, so you now have multiple versions of cards. If buying them in bulk, the line probably gets refreshed so it's hard to buy the same model of hardware twice. Then, when you have to rebuild an older computer a year or two later, you have to remember where you put those drivers for that particular card that this computer uses. Since it was bought on the cheap, it probably isn't marked very well and unless you had the luxury of looking at the computer before it went down, what model it is might not even be known. Even then, since the hardware was bought cheap, the drivers might not be as easy to get online as one would think, especially if the company isn't around anymore. There is also all sorts of tiny details dealing with this or that hardware that has to be remembered. Then you need storage for all the bits, parts, and driver software. Trying to call in hardware warrantees for the products you buy will usually be much more time consuming than just calling your vendor and having them do everything based on the serial number of the broken computer. In the end, building and maintaining our own computers was way more trouble and man hours than just going with a name brand such as HP or Dell and using their warrantees. Whatever got saved in material costs in building our own computers got more than spent in extra man hours maintaining them.
Knowing France, it will probably only be good at a French government site that only sells music by French bands or sung in French that have been approved by some council of culture.
Unfortunately, since Android is open source and released to the wild, they can provide a QA test suite, but they cannot really make people use it. What I think they should have done is continued with the Nexus and provided a constant bar for the other carriers making their own phones with Android to aim for. They had to come out with the Nexus because the hardware from the carriers was lacking. Chances are that now that they've discontinued the Nexus, the carriers will once again lag behind. Nevermind that several of my friends have asked for criteria in a new phone that the Nexus would have fit but nothing else does due to features or carrier, but I had to just tell them they were SOL. Google needs to lead by example with Android, because nobody else will.
I'm going to chip in a bit here and say that part of AoC's problem was that it was boring, or at least presented as such. I was at GenCon a few years ago when it was being demoed. AoC had a walled off booth, with booth babes giving away plastic swords, and you had to be 18+ to get in. I waited in line to see it expecting some killer graphics while running around a snake god temple with slave girls chained to the walls and slicing down bad guys. What I got was running around a field and empty village with an occasional bandit that would show up and get killed in an unspectacular couple of strokes. Perhaps the graphics on the grass in that field was really good, but I'm not interested in nice looking grass. I left and told everybody I knew about how boring AoC looked. I'm sure thousands of others from that weekend did the same. I'm not saying the entire game was like that, but if that's what people came up with to display the game in such a venue, I can't really expect that they presented the game that well in any other venue either. Since I bet most MMO sales are from word of mouth from friends, it was still a bad choice.
You obviously did not have a Sidekick.
Yes, but it is a good example of winning the battles and losing the war. Where are the USSR now? Gone and surrounded by former Warsaw pact nations that have sided with Western Europe if not actively feuding with Russia. Even the USSR is no longer as they are just "the Russians" as former parts of the USSR have separated to form even more hostile counties on their borders. There were only two really important parts to the Space Race besides the publicity battle and that was for putting satellites up in orbit and to launch ICBMs. We both did the first and nobody did the second. Meanwhile we had the high altitude flying knowledge before hand to run U2 and SR-71 spy missions as well as plenty of bombers based on their border to drop bombs. The only way the Space Race would have been the sole importance in the cold war is if they would have built the missiles and launched them before the US had caught up. In the end, it was an economic battle and they picked all the wrong choices.
I'm sorry, I don't think you've ever actually studied WW2 in any detail. Frist, Japan did take on the Soviet Union and got their asses handed to them both times in battles of Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol . They sued for peace and turned their eyes to China. Second, the European theater was completely decided on the Eastern Front. The Germans failed to win at the Battle of Moscow. The Russians had turned everything around by Stalingrad. By time the Battle of Kursk happened, the end of Nazi Germany was written. D-Day and the Western European Front dealt with a forth of the resources that the Germans were throwing at the Eastern Front. If the Allies had not landed in Europe, the Soviet Union would have gone all the way to the sea.
While it may be arguable that the Soviet Union might not have been is such a good spot without Lend Lease and things were touch and go in the early part of the war, they still did the brunt of all the fighting against the Nazis.
Obligitory xkcd.
Lots of people suggest either turning the monitor vertical or say that there are larger resolution monitors still out there. Yes, there are monitors with more horizontal pixels out there, but they are not like the normal monitors I bought seven years ago that I'm trying to buy new one for, they are usually high priced professional models. I'm having a hard time replacing my 8 year old $150 CRT because nothing new has any better vertical resolution, which is what I'm looking for. I can understand that everything is going towards watching movies, but I also work on my computer. If I'm going to upgrade, I would want better. Even if I rotate the monitor, then my lack of horizontal pixels is making things even worse. In 8 years, despite the change of monitor technology, I would expect a similarly priced monitor to have a better resolution. While they arguably are better for watching movies anyway, it's hard to find one for actually doing work as the typical vertical resolution actually seems to have dropped for similar price ranges.
It doesn't matter. Most of us are just going to pronounce it 'England' anyway.
However, claiming that you forgot when you haven't would probably be perjury. If nobody believes you, including the jury at your perjury trial, it would be illegal whether you actually did forget or not.
No, but if you computer freezes because of a program, you still hit it to get to task manager to kill the software or reboot. He did say software, not OS. It is also a jab at how often does MS expect their tablets to act like normal computers with normal computer problems. Normal computer tablets have been out there for a long time as others have stated, and no really taken off (I have two dozen deployed to doctors right now, but they could care less that their laptop can also be used as a tablet and usually ask I rebuild without the tablet software to get a little more speed out of what was a poorly performing computer to begin with). Apple and probably the other new comers will be more of an appliance and people expect apps that just work rather than computer programs that freeze occasionally.
What you're forgetting to mention is that the man was only playing football in college to spite a rival college and that he was funding his entire college team. During that time he scored lots of touchdowns, but only really replays the first one because it was the first, usually at the request of other people from the college. He could do it again, but he'd have to rebuild the league, buy everybody new uniforms, construct a new stadium, all when the inter-college rivalries aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, the man has other hobbies, family, mortgages, and other expenses. He still gets out, plays some sports, and does what he wants to do, and only everybody else who wants him to start a new league team is trying to relive past glories.
Not especially as it means that Apple really isn't worried that much about people hacking them. I'm sure they could make it much harder to hack if they really wanted to.
Except he has yet to have his Cuban Missile Crisis, cause like the Civil Rights Movement to support, create something like the Peace Corp, set a grand goal (and support) for space exploration, etc. For that matter, I don't think he's really given any inspiring speeches since the election. His trial by fire has been the repression, which was and has turned out pretty lackluster. This only real bit of legeslation has been the insurance reform, which hasn't even come into effect yet, and if it does before it gets canned, we'll still have to wait to see if it's actually a good program or not to judge him by. Besides being assassinated, JFK was a strong president that made a lot of decisions in his administration that turned out to be good. For Obama to be like JFK, he's going to have to take the challenges he is being given, the repression, health care, the wars, etc. and actually do something and have it turn out well. Realistically, we won't find out if that's true for another administration or two after he's out of office like any other president.
No, no, you don't understand. Those are the things that make vinyl sound better!
I don't think you know what you are talking about. The right to bear arms was taken from the UK common law and one of the items of contention between the colonies was that they were taking the colonial arms in a way they couldn't citizens of the UK. It wasn't till after WW1 that the UK started really limiting the ability to bear arms in the UK (because they were afraid people might use them due to civil unrest).
Or creating a company and having stock in it that is theoretically worth that much, but isn't income or actual money till you try and sell it.
Living in a state that doesn't have income tax, the one we are talking about, I don't believe for a second that that $200,000 figure won't creep lower and lower till we are all paying it. This isn't taxing the rich, it's a trojan horse to sneak in the ability to tax everybody. That's how Washington (the state) does it's politics and power creep. They initiate a law that has a very limited effect, so that it sounds reasonable and is favored by the voting population, then they slowly increase the effect of the law till it affects everybody. It's much easier than just flat out creating a law that affects everybody and would never be put up with by the voting population in one big chunk.
Nope. I'm getting old and boring too. My younger friends (20's) will spend much of the time I'm with them getting texts and such. I just can't find the need. Even Twitter is something I have but don't really use or get. (and more than likely, most of those 100 texts a day are cross linked uses of twitter or other apps also.
Well, now that they've actually produced code, it's going to be hard to call it a failure.
Yes, because it is more than just an open source alternative. It is a test bed for crowdsourced project funding. They went on Kickstarter.com and asked for $10,000. They ended up with $200,000 instead. A good number of people with no interest in computers are watching this because if it fails, it would also be a failure for using the internet to raise funds for any project and stifle donations to other projects. If it succeeds, it increases the likelyhood that using sites like Kickstarter is a viable method of not only getting funds but also providing a place to donate funds to projects you support.
Because a lot of people have their eyes on Diaspora for a variety of reasons. This is not just a test of Diaspora but also Kickstarter which is the fundraising site they used to get the money to make this project. They went on Kickstarter and proposed to write "Diaspora - the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" if they got $10,000 worth of funds. Because Facebook privacy, or lack of it was in the news at the time, they ended up with just over $200,000 in funds from several thousand donators, some who donated more than $2000. The way Kickstarter works is if the level of funding is reached, then the money is with withdrawn and given to the people it was pledged to. If they had gotten the money and never even produced code, it would not only have been a disaster for Diaspora, but also Kickstarter. Now that code has actually be produced and it is open source, it bodes well not just for them but also Kickstarter and using the internet for fund your projects.
Then there is still the core goal of producing that Facebook replacement with privacy in mind. Lots of people want that if only to put pressure on Facebook to pay attention to their own privacy concerns.
So, what you are saying is that HTC doesn't give a rat's ass about brand loyalty but just wants a quick sale.
Apple's ecosystem has very little to do with it. I have a Mac and iPhone, but have no need for an iPod (iPhone makes it superfluous really even though I was a hold out against using my phone as a music player). However, i have friends who are strongly Windows that are quite happy with their iPhone and have stated they will not go back (after the Sidekick debacle). The well thought out product with the continued support with what generates brand loyalty and gets people to buy other products, not the other way around.
I would say it is a worse model. Maybe not for the manufacturer, but certainly for the user. Some people don't like the walled garden approach from Apple and want a completely open version of a well thought out product with continued support. They want an open brand they can have loyalty in. Unfortunatly, despite that the tools are there with Android, it doesn't appear that anyone cares to step into that market niche. Possibly because if you make a decent phone with continued support and have no other products for people to invest in and feature creep isn't enough to get people who already have your phone to buy a new one, it just doesn't pay off.