Amazon wanted to sell e-books for less then their competitors (e.g. Apple and Google soon).
I'm not clear on how Amazon is going to have a monopoly or about why it is bad for them to try to sell products for less then Apple.
Apple & MacMillan wanted the books sold for a higher price, and more importantly, they wanted to force all of the e-book retailers to sell for the same price. How do you think that it is good for customers that their is now an agreed upon price for selling books and no one is allowed to undercut (i.e. compete with) that price?
This is great for Apple - their customers aren't price sensitive so they will keep buying - and they have maintained their high margins.
Actually, I think it was the success of the iPod that revived them more then the switch back to a closed hardware platform.
But either way, I would argue against the implication that Apple MUST maintain such a closed platform in order to be profitable. I think we all accept that Apple is very good at marketing and execution and that they have the most valuable/cool brand in technology. Yes, the ways that they keep their platform closed and under tight control produce a little extra gravy for the bottom line, but I think they could still be very profitable without out all of the negative stuff.
Otherwise, it seems to imply that all of the companies that implement the open and fair business and technology practices that we espouse here will fail. That they have to be nasty to win. I hope not.
Back in the day we (including myself) used to get mad at MS for all the anti-competitive things they did.
Now Apple comes along with stuff that MS never dreamed of (or could have got away with) and everybody loves them. Now I get to listen to my friends talk about what a wonderful and cool company Apple is and how they invented everything.
It came down to one thing: the iPod caused the revivial of Apple. It led to the iPhone and gave them the financial resources to improve OS X.
So, what person, or team of people are responsible for making the iPod happen (for all I know maybe that was Steve Jobs)? Shouldn't they be getting all of the accolades now?
The problem isn't so much the app store approval process, it is that there is no other way to get your app onto (non jail broken) iPhones.
Soon everyone will have an app store, and maybe they too will refuse to carry applications that compete with them, but at least those other platforms allow the consumer the choice to get those applications somewhere else.
The smartphone is the next personal computer, so let's imagine for a moment that Microsoft had done for Windows what Apple is now doing with the iPhone: they get to approve every app, take a 30% cut of all profits, and deny anything that might compete with them (e.g. any browser other then IE). Windows would have no viruses, but at what cost?
I think this looks great. Thanks to ubiquity for sponsoring this and thank you for creating such an excellent solution.
A couple of questions about the requirements. Isn't libopenssl a general requirement of openwrt rather then a requirement of PyCl itself? I don't know openWRT too well but was under the impression that openSSL was central to any secure networking functionality in Linux.
Also, why do you require pyOpenSSL? I thought that open SSL support was part of the Python standard library as of Python 2.6.
I hope that PyCl will be incorporated into the (non-minimal) builds of OpenWRT!
> Apple is one of the few companies to grasp the benefits of open source early, but the benefits are as much in contribution as they are in use - if you keep improvement's to yourself others cannot improve on them.
Apple grasped the benefits of using open source early. They grasped the benefits of contributing to open source when they had no other choice because they were building on open source.
If you want to create a peripheral or software that works with the Bluetooth of the iPhone or the iPod (excepting the basic audio peripherals) you have to apply for Apple's "Made for iPod Licensing" program. http://developer.apple.com/ipod/apply.html
If Apple can achieve the sort of dominance in the consumer smartphone market that they have achieved with their iPods then this will pay off very well for them. They will make money from licensing and other companies phones won't be able to communicate with iPhones/iPods.
On the other hand, whether they are successful or not, this is bad for their users. This being/. I probably don't have to explain why standards are good.
At this time, if you want to e.g. sell a Bluetooth garage door opener for smartphones (yes, this really exists) you could support it on RIM, Nokia, MS, and even some LG and Samsung phones. I hope that Android phones join this camp.
I'm interested to see some of the things that people will do with Bluetooth now that the quality of the hardware and software support is getting good enough (it wasn't good enough on a lot of the older phones). It would be sad if the lure of proprietary were to curtail the potential of Bluetooth.
I'm sure that Google could have finalized their Bluetooth API by now if they wanted to.
The scary thing is the idea that Google might be considering going the same route as Apple: a proprietary Bluetooth protocol that they can license and control, rather then supporting the Bluetooth standards. That wouldn't be like Google, but it is otherwise hard to understand their hesitation.
'the public' doesn't actually care whether it is open source or not.
Developers (and other techies) often do, and hopefully they know the difference between an OS that is really open source (e.g. Linux or Android) and one that just uses open source code where convenient and keeps everything that they create themselves as closed as they can get away with (e.g. MacOS and WebOS).
> The problem isn't the language, the problem is the development environment.
The problem isn't the language, it's the API's.
I don't care what language I have to use, if the OS doesn't provide me with access to useful API's then the applications will be boring.
For example, can I write a Bluetooth application and distribute it to Palm users without them having to rebuild the OS or jail break it or anything like that.
I agree with you that the lack of RFCOMM (and bluetooth in general) support for applications is too bad, and pretty wierd actually. All Nokia, SE, and Blackberry phones have supported this for years now. Even the iPhone will be getting this soon.
All I can do is wait and hope they add this to Android 2.0. The fact that I can rebuild the OS to fix that doesn't really help me.
From the changelog it would appear that there are still no bluetooth API's. This makes it pretty much the only phone available that doesn't have this. Too bad.
Yes, all of this complaining about Google should be taken in context. People are saying that this is an instance of their 'we rule the world' attitude, but there are lots of other companies that do the same (constantly running updaters) and worse.
Quicktime is a good example, and HP printer software is another.
At least Google has shown us the code. No way that those others would.
"The future is open" video positions Linux in relation to Windows. I think it's time to move beyond this.
There was time when some people saw Linux as a reaction to how bad and how evil Windows was.
That was a long time ago. In the mean time Microsoft has become much less powerful, and Apple has shown us that there can be something even worse then MS (in terms of Linux values, that is).
Linux is about freedom and community and [fill in the blank]. It is not just the anti-windows.
No, it is more then just Apple forcing you to buy a higher end system then you need.
With Apple, you pay more for the same thing. Another way to show this is by comparing Apple's margins against those of the their major PC competitors. I'm sorry that I don't have those figures to provide here, but everytime I see this discussed in one of reports from IDC or one of the other business intelligence groups, Apple has margins that are the envy of the industry.
This goes a bit full circle - one of the reasons that they have the highest margins is that they don't sell low-end machines - but that only explains some of the difference. You could argue that their margins are so good because they have the most efficient systems, but I doubt they could have more efficient production and distibution then a company such as Dell which is really about being efficient and reducing costs in those areas.
Dell's recent introduction of the Adamo notebook is their attempt to learn something from Apple about improving their margins. Apple has shown us that the extra money spent on marketing and styling is more then recouped in the ability to charge more. Personally, this concerns me. It doesn't threanen the low end market but Apple envy is likely to make all of the PC manufacturers try to get higher margins on their more powerful machines.
Let me answer that from the perspective of a Windows user, keeping in mind that there are lots of Windows users and they are the most likely new converts to KDE.
KDE 3.5 was not available on Windows (though some Qt apps were). KDE 4 is.
I think it is quite an achievement that the entire desktop is truly portable. Not an achievement in the noble sense, but in the practical sense of vastly increasing its potential audience.
If I wanted to convert a Windows user to Linux I would start by installing KDE 4.2 on their Windows box and get them to start using it - at whatever speed they are comfortable with.
Now, speaking as a developer, with Qt 4 being more portable then Qt 3, and Qt 4.5 being LGPL, there is much more reason to write Qt (and KDE) apps. So hopefully your concern about lack of KDE 4 apps will be remedied soon.
It might be a long time before there is a 'real' Google phone on 850MHz, so I wonder what the status is of using Android on other phones? Has Android been ported to some of the other HTC phones? Does it work well, or is it just for hackers?
Ideally I would like something that supported both 850 and 2100MHz for 3G.
How can this thing not have bluetooth? Bluetooth is incredibly cheap to add and it would open a lot of applications, such as adding a keyboard and tethering to your phone.
The user could plug a USB bluetooth dongle into a port on the device, but that is much less convenient and it sticks out.
My first language is C/C++, not Java, but obviously Java and J2ME are the closest thing we have to a standard mobile development platform, so please support them!
The recent trend away from J2ME is making it a nightmare to support a broad range of phones.
They should do what Nokia does with Symbian: it supports C/C++ apps for Symbian but it also supports J2ME apps.
I'm a C++ developer and I was interested in participating in OOo soon after Sun purchased it.
I joined the project and started participating in the discussion about which GUI toolkit to use. The idea was to start using a common GUI toolkit such as GTK, wxWidgets, SWT, Qt, instead of continuing with the current GUI code which was a mess and was specific to OOo. A lively discussion took place and some consensus emerged, but then behind the scenes it was decided to stick with the existing code.
It seems so obvious to me that using one of the GUI toolkits would have facilitated sharing code and developers with the rest of the open-source community. For example, I wanted to work on the GUI code, but I had no interest in getting involved in this toolkit that was just for OOo, so I abandoned the idea of participating.
I took the train from Toronto to Quebec City a couple of weeks ago. It was very slow. The line is primarily for freight and the passenger trains have to do a lot of slowing down to coordinate with the freight trains.
The seats all had power outlets, which was great and the WiFi internet service was very reasonably prices. On the other hand, the internet service was so slow it was unusable, and the train vibrated so much that it was hard to get any work done.
The internet service could easily be improved, but the vibration problem was probably due to low quality tracks so it would be hard to fix.
Also, have you looked at the price of a train ticket to go out to Vancouver? It is outrageous.
Just because Google adds support for bluetooth API's to Android won't prevent manufacturers from removing that support, but then we can blame the manufacturer/carrier.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon wanted to sell e-books for less then their competitors (e.g. Apple and Google soon).
I'm not clear on how Amazon is going to have a monopoly or about why it is bad for them to try to sell products for less then Apple.
Apple & MacMillan wanted the books sold for a higher price, and more importantly, they wanted to force all of the e-book retailers to sell for the same price. How do you think that it is good for customers that their is now an agreed upon price for selling books and no one is allowed to undercut (i.e. compete with) that price?
This is great for Apple - their customers aren't price sensitive so they will keep buying - and they have maintained their high margins.
Aren't a lot of white collar jobs like this now?
- "Unending crunch periods"
- 12-hour work days and 6-day weeks
When I was a systems consultant that was pretty much the norm. As a consultant I got off easy compared to the regular employees.
Actually, I think it was the success of the iPod that revived them more then the switch back to a closed hardware platform.
But either way, I would argue against the implication that Apple MUST maintain such a closed platform in order to be profitable. I think we all accept that Apple is very good at marketing and execution and that they have the most valuable/cool brand in technology. Yes, the ways that they keep their platform closed and under tight control produce a little extra gravy for the bottom line, but I think they could still be very profitable without out all of the negative stuff.
Otherwise, it seems to imply that all of the companies that implement the open and fair business and technology practices that we espouse here will fail. That they have to be nasty to win. I hope not.
Back in the day we (including myself) used to get mad at MS for all the anti-competitive things they did.
Now Apple comes along with stuff that MS never dreamed of (or could have got away with) and everybody loves them. Now I get to listen to my friends talk about what a wonderful and cool company Apple is and how they invented everything.
What is going on here?
It came down to one thing: the iPod caused the revivial of Apple. It led to the iPhone and gave them the financial resources to improve OS X.
So, what person, or team of people are responsible for making the iPod happen (for all I know maybe that was Steve Jobs)? Shouldn't they be getting all of the accolades now?
The problem isn't so much the app store approval process, it is that there is no other way to get your app onto (non jail broken) iPhones.
Soon everyone will have an app store, and maybe they too will refuse to carry applications that compete with them, but at least those other platforms allow the consumer the choice to get those applications somewhere else.
The smartphone is the next personal computer, so let's imagine for a moment that Microsoft had done for Windows what Apple is now doing with the iPhone: they get to approve every app, take a 30% cut of all profits, and deny anything that might compete with them (e.g. any browser other then IE). Windows would have no viruses, but at what cost?
The thing that bugs me about the name is that it is difficult to Google.
I know you want a cute name, but please give us something more unique that we can search with!
Same goes for you D!
I think this looks great. Thanks to ubiquity for sponsoring this and thank you for creating such an excellent solution.
A couple of questions about the requirements. Isn't libopenssl a general requirement of openwrt rather then a requirement of PyCl itself? I don't know openWRT too well but was under the impression that openSSL was central to any secure networking functionality in Linux.
Also, why do you require pyOpenSSL? I thought that open SSL support was part of the Python standard library as of Python 2.6.
I hope that PyCl will be incorporated into the (non-minimal) builds of OpenWRT!
> Apple is one of the few companies to grasp the benefits of open source early, but the benefits are as much in contribution as they are in use - if you keep improvement's to yourself others cannot improve on them.
Apple grasped the benefits of using open source early. They grasped the benefits of contributing to open source when they had no other choice because they were building on open source.
If you want to create a peripheral or software that works with the Bluetooth of the iPhone or the iPod (excepting the basic audio peripherals) you have to apply for Apple's "Made for iPod Licensing" program.
http://developer.apple.com/ipod/apply.html
If you need a Bluetooth chipset supporting the Apple protocols you can buy them from CSR.
http://www.embeddedstar.com/weblog/2009/07/28/csr-ipod-touch/
If Apple can achieve the sort of dominance in the consumer smartphone market that they have achieved with their iPods then this will pay off very well for them. They will make money from licensing and other companies phones won't be able to communicate with iPhones/iPods.
On the other hand, whether they are successful or not, this is bad for their users. This being /. I probably don't have to explain why standards are good.
At this time, if you want to e.g. sell a Bluetooth garage door opener for smartphones (yes, this really exists) you could support it on RIM, Nokia, MS, and even some LG and Samsung phones. I hope that Android phones join this camp.
I'm interested to see some of the things that people will do with Bluetooth now that the quality of the hardware and software support is getting good enough (it wasn't good enough on a lot of the older phones). It would be sad if the lure of proprietary were to curtail the potential of Bluetooth.
I'm sure that Google could have finalized their Bluetooth API by now if they wanted to.
The scary thing is the idea that Google might be considering going the same route as Apple: a proprietary Bluetooth protocol that they can license and control, rather then supporting the Bluetooth standards. That wouldn't be like Google, but it is otherwise hard to understand their hesitation.
'the public' doesn't actually care whether it is open source or not.
Developers (and other techies) often do, and hopefully they know the difference between an OS that is really open source (e.g. Linux or Android) and one that just uses open source code where convenient and keeps everything that they create themselves as closed as they can get away with (e.g. MacOS and WebOS).
> The problem isn't the language, the problem is the development environment.
The problem isn't the language, it's the API's.
I don't care what language I have to use, if the OS doesn't provide me with access to useful API's then the applications will be boring.
For example, can I write a Bluetooth application and distribute it to Palm users without them having to rebuild the OS or jail break it or anything like that.
I agree with you that the lack of RFCOMM (and bluetooth in general) support for applications is too bad, and pretty wierd actually. All Nokia, SE, and Blackberry phones have supported this for years now. Even the iPhone will be getting this soon.
All I can do is wait and hope they add this to Android 2.0. The fact that I can rebuild the OS to fix that doesn't really help me.
From the changelog it would appear that there are still no bluetooth API's. This makes it pretty much the only phone available that doesn't have this. Too bad.
Yes, all of this complaining about Google should be taken in context. People are saying that this is an instance of their 'we rule the world' attitude, but there are lots of other companies that do the same (constantly running updaters) and worse.
Quicktime is a good example, and HP printer software is another.
At least Google has shown us the code. No way that those others would.
"The future is open" video positions Linux in relation to Windows. I think it's time to move beyond this.
There was time when some people saw Linux as a reaction to how bad and how evil Windows was.
That was a long time ago. In the mean time Microsoft has become much less powerful, and Apple has shown us that there can be something even worse then MS (in terms of Linux values, that is).
Linux is about freedom and community and [fill in the blank]. It is not just the anti-windows.
I vote against "the future is open".
No, it is more then just Apple forcing you to buy a higher end system then you need.
With Apple, you pay more for the same thing. Another way to show this is by comparing Apple's margins against those of the their major PC competitors. I'm sorry that I don't have those figures to provide here, but everytime I see this discussed in one of reports from IDC or one of the other business intelligence groups, Apple has margins that are the envy of the industry.
This goes a bit full circle - one of the reasons that they have the highest margins is that they don't sell low-end machines - but that only explains some of the difference. You could argue that their margins are so good because they have the most efficient systems, but I doubt they could have more efficient production and distibution then a company such as Dell which is really about being efficient and reducing costs in those areas.
Dell's recent introduction of the Adamo notebook is their attempt to learn something from Apple about improving their margins. Apple has shown us that the extra money spent on marketing and styling is more then recouped in the ability to charge more. Personally, this concerns me. It doesn't threanen the low end market but Apple envy is likely to make all of the PC manufacturers try to get higher margins on their more powerful machines.
Let me answer that from the perspective of a Windows user, keeping in mind that there are lots of Windows users and they are the most likely new converts to KDE.
KDE 3.5 was not available on Windows (though some Qt apps were). KDE 4 is.
I think it is quite an achievement that the entire desktop is truly portable. Not an achievement in the noble sense, but in the practical sense of vastly increasing its potential audience.
If I wanted to convert a Windows user to Linux I would start by installing KDE 4.2 on their Windows box and get them to start using it - at whatever speed they are comfortable with.
Now, speaking as a developer, with Qt 4 being more portable then Qt 3, and Qt 4.5 being LGPL, there is much more reason to write Qt (and KDE) apps. So hopefully your concern about lack of KDE 4 apps will be remedied soon.
It might be a long time before there is a 'real' Google phone on 850MHz, so I wonder what the status is of using Android on other phones? Has Android been ported to some of the other HTC phones? Does it work well, or is it just for hackers?
Ideally I would like something that supported both 850 and 2100MHz for 3G.
How can this thing not have bluetooth? Bluetooth is incredibly cheap to add and it would open a lot of applications, such as adding a keyboard and tethering to your phone.
The user could plug a USB bluetooth dongle into a port on the device, but that is much less convenient and it sticks out.
My first language is C/C++, not Java, but obviously Java and J2ME are the closest thing we have to a standard mobile development platform, so please support them!
The recent trend away from J2ME is making it a nightmare to support a broad range of phones.
They should do what Nokia does with Symbian: it supports C/C++ apps for Symbian but it also supports J2ME apps.
I'm a C++ developer and I was interested in participating in OOo soon after Sun purchased it.
I joined the project and started participating in the discussion about which GUI toolkit to use. The idea was to start using a common GUI toolkit such as GTK, wxWidgets, SWT, Qt, instead of continuing with the current GUI code which was a mess and was specific to OOo. A lively discussion took place and some consensus emerged, but then behind the scenes it was decided to stick with the existing code.
It seems so obvious to me that using one of the GUI toolkits would have facilitated sharing code and developers with the rest of the open-source community. For example, I wanted to work on the GUI code, but I had no interest in getting involved in this toolkit that was just for OOo, so I abandoned the idea of participating.
Um, no.
I took the train from Toronto to Quebec City a couple of weeks ago. It was very slow. The line is primarily for freight and the passenger trains have to do a lot of slowing down to coordinate with the freight trains.
The seats all had power outlets, which was great and the WiFi internet service was very reasonably prices. On the other hand, the internet service was so slow it was unusable, and the train vibrated so much that it was hard to get any work done.
The internet service could easily be improved, but the vibration problem was probably due to low quality tracks so it would be hard to fix.
Also, have you looked at the price of a train ticket to go out to Vancouver? It is outrageous.
I should add...
Just because Google adds support for bluetooth API's to Android won't prevent manufacturers from removing that support, but then we can blame the manufacturer/carrier.