Maybe not, but I have a BB10 phone already. It's a pretty decent device, re-written from the ground up, natively supports ActiveSync, etc. Don't judge it based on old BlackBerrys.
I've been doing BB development for a few years and they've never required business plans, don't know what happened there.
Registering for App World requires a scan of government photo ID, most people use their driver's license or passport. It's human reviewed so it takes a couple days but it's pretty painless. All the notarized form requirements are gone. The signing keys are free now and just require an email. The entire process has actually become quite painless, and BB10 is actually a nice platform to develop for. All BBOS development has left me wanting to smash my phone, but BB10 development I'll do for fun.
You are aware they have zero debt and are sitting on over a billion in cash and growing? Yes, growing their cash, even this quarter with all the doom and gloom. You have a very interesting definition of "bleeding money out their assholes". They're also adding subscribers, total number of people with active BlackBerrys is at an all time high. They have their issues but they're not going to be filing for bankruptcy tomorrow, despite common perception.
in any Blackberry I've ever owned or seen in smoothness, intuitiveness, app switching, ecosystem, and whatever else you can think of.
There is a key qualified there, that you've "owned or seen". The new BB7 devices really don't get the credit they should have and very few people know them. Everyone seems to have missed that RIM changed their UI over to 60fps hardware accelerated rendering. The result is an experience far smoother than the vast majority of Android devices. Things like pinch zoom in the browser are as smooth as iOS.
I'm not going to tell you that BlackBerry has a ton of apps, I'd be deluding myself. But the IM, email and social networking experience the GP was referring to is really unmatched by other platforms.
There's a difference between "can't afford" and "not willing to pay for". If you look at the US and government spending as a percentage of GDP ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Government_spending_as_a_percentage_of_GDP ) it's not that out of line with other countries. The problem is that taxation as a percentage of GDP hasn't kept up to pay for it all.
I'm not going to say the US shouldn't cut anything, but what to cut is really outside the scope of this and discussing it wouldn't end well. To point is just that, other economically successful countries (say Canada, which doesn't have a debt crisis) manage with governments that spend an even larger amount of money. The US could afford what it currently spends if it raised taxes to levels seen in many other developed countries, or even just close to those levels.
The Kindle Fire has half the RAM, half the storage of the PB base model, no cameras, no Bluetooth, single band WiFi, slower CPU/GPU, and lower quality (less accurate) touch screen. There may be other changes too, wouldn't be surprised if it was a lower quality LCD panel, the PB's is amazing and with that expensive.
RIM has been quite clear they're not abandoning the PlayBook, and have stated so officially on multiple occasions. Already there are starting to be rumours about a PlayBook 2. The OS on the PlayBook will power their next generation of phones, so they've got strong incentive to keep software development going. Despite all the bad press RIM remains quite profitable, making many hundreds of millions per year and selling over 40 million devices per year. They're not going to go bankrupt any time soon, and short of their bankruptcy the PlayBook won't be abandoned.
The thing about the PlayBook though is that it's already open enough you don't really need the root. What is this "unofficial code"? RIM already has a publicly available C/C++ Native SDK, they've even ported several open source apps and libraries themselves and made them available on Github. The PlayBook has also permitted sideloading since day one, so it's not even like you need RIM approval.
Go to Menu -> Modules while in the applications list and you'll see every module. Opening up an application will also show you the modules for that application, and let you edit the app's permissions. I see everything that's an actual app my carrier (Rogers) has installed, and found the Rogers certificates. The VPLs (virtual pre-loads) are just homescreen bookmarks so they're not listed as apps until you open them and do the installation. Most things carriers push are just VPLs.
I should point out though that your carrier already knows what numbers you dialled and when you received messages. Anything that connects off device is obviously readable and loggable by them, BES of course excepted due to the encryption.
It does serve a useful purpose though. One, it provides push email service even for accounts only accessible over POP/IMAP/OWA. While obviously the push isn't instant, it does result in significant battery/data savings. It also enables compression, which I definitely appreciate when roaming. Compression also means better battery life.
You're right though that it doesn't strictly need to be there. I do think ActiveSync support is a good idea, and I do think we'll see it on BBX.
In either case my point wasn't really about the merits. In the years I've owned a BlackBerry I've only experienced two of those outages and they've been short enough. BlackBerry sure has its issues, but reliability is a pretty minor one.
It just means the app. Given Google's desire for Google Apps to be taken seriously in the enterprise I doubt the BES Connector will be discontinued any time soon.
Any device shipped in the last two years has either come with or is upgradeable to OS 6, meaning a WebKit browser. OS 7 actually has a pretty nice browser, the 60 fps hardware acceleration means it's much smoother than Android when scrolling/zooming. Pages also load quite fast. Okay, not quite as fast as the iPhone 4S, but an iPhone 4-like browsing experience is hardly "awful".
In the past decade RIM has had 3 big outages. While less than ideal it's not exactly an awful track record either. Any system inevitably has some downtime.
The newer BIS versions actually permit you to search remotely in the native client and access your full email history. In your inbox go Menu -> Search By -> Advanced. There's an On Device/Remotely option. Used to be exclusively BES, but that's changed. If you don't see it delete and re-add the account in the email setup app, some of the newer features require initial (automatic) setup steps.
@Pseudonym Authority
With newer devices that limit has been increased 10x. I've never had a message be truncated. That limit doesn't include external images or attachments.
You can get a hosted BES/Exchange setup for a small fee. You have to have a trusted hosting provider in a country you consider safe.
Unlike many of the custom Android solutions being suggested on here, this requires an unmodified BlackBerry in a setup that is standard for pretty much any company. Having a setup which is highly customized for evading surveillance might work well, but if you're caught with it the consequences could be severe. Having something which is standard fare among business travellers makes you far less suspicious. Many oppressive regimes will throw you in jail even without being able to decrypt your data if they think it's suspicious enough.
As other posters have pointed out, RIM only provides access to BIS data. If you're running BES (an enterprise server) there's no way RIM can hand over your data. They've had the BES server software audited by independent agencies to confirm its security. Additionally, the on-device security is excellent. Unlike certain other mobile platforms there have been no attacks that can bypass the password lock screen. Additionally there's a full set of encryption and memory cleaning options.
Even back then, he was supporting many extreme leftist ideas and policies on the campaign trail...but, the majority of US citizens must have been missing it. I know I was.
I don't think Obama is extreme left, not even close, and I say that with full knowledge of his policies. On the US political spectrum he's left, neither extreme or moderate, but on a global political spectrum he's quite conservative. Health care reform, as originally proposed by him, still wouldn't have created a universal health care system. The US is the only developed country without one. There's plenty more examples, but I think you get my point. It's about local vs global context.
To the rest of the world, anyone farther right than "American centre-left" is a nutcase. I describe most Republican senators as "batshit insane" without any risk of offending people in Canada. Here even our most conservative major party supports a single-payer universal health care system.
A couple European countries haven't done so well, they're the ones in the news. Greek and Irish bailouts don't change the accomplishments of the rest of the continent. I also encourage you to look at little closer to home at Canada. In many ways we're farther left than Europe, and not so coincidentally have a very stable financial sector (Europe deregulated under US pressure, Canada didn't).
Remember, the rest of the developed world is politically left of the US. Globally there's more success stories than failures, and the US economy isn't looking so great these days.
There's also more than just the economy. I'd still take living in Ireland over living in the US. Any country where more than 5% of people think Sarah Palin is anything but a complete moron scares me.
But there's the thing, MobileMe. AFAIK there is no enterprise equivalent to MobileMe where it can be centrally managed. Also, two-way push sync with your e-mail server is the whole point of BES. It syncs just about everything on your phone with the equivalent Outlook (or whatever) features. It also provides end to end AES encryption, compared to the iPhone situation where the iPhone was reporting encryption when there wasn't any. That has rightfully so shaken the faith of a lot of security-minded people in the iPhone.
Yes, of course, that's why the Homebrew channel doesn't let you play burned games. That requires a modchip, and in the case of modchips you're probably right. Though I do think that consumers should have the right to make a backup copy of their media, a right which would supersede DRM protections. If I buy the argument that I'm licensing a game, then the physical media is meaningless to my license. If however I am purchasing the physical media, then I should have the right to edit it and copy it. I know which of these two publishers would prefer.
And BTW, the Wii doesn't even have enough internal memory for 1 Wii game, much less 150. WiiWare doesn't count, they're more like minigames.
Right now the competition is better. The rate that Bell (Qwest in your example) can charge the competition is regulated by the CRTC to costs + 15% profit margin. This whole article is about the CRTC removing that regulation, creating a situation like you have with Qwest where the independent ISPs will cost significantly more.
There are still DSL wholesalers, that use Telus's or Bell's last-mile infrastructure, but have their own transit/DNS/e-mail/etc. I'm with TekSavvy, which I know services both Bell and Telus areas. Otherwise I'm not sure about Telus, I live in Bell-land so I mostly know Bell-area ISPs. I think TekSavvy is the only one that services both Bell and Telus areas (Yak does, but they just re-sell TekSavvy).
Schools and police may be local responsibilities, but I doubt they're funded entirely by local taxes. Here, in Canada, smaller governments (provincial and local) charge taxes too but it doesn't come close to their expenditures. There's a significant funds transfer from upper level governments.
ER and hospitals are private expenditures in the US (should be or not is a different debate). But everything else on that list is funded by the government.
It's also not unreasonable that in this day and age as we ask for more from our governments that spending would grow. Setting up government websites and putting massive amounts of information online costs money, and that's just one example of a new expenditure. And it's not a bad one, websites have greatly increased access to government information.
I think that's exactly it, things like adding extra repositories, installing packages for really basic stuff. I find Mandriva just has that extra bit of polish in working right out of the box.
It has its rough edges in other areas, but on the whole I quite like it for desktop use. I'm technical enough to have no issue with a much more technical distro (and use them all the time for servers), but for my desktop I really like Mandriva's polish. The polish might be comparable to Ubuntu (not a ton of first hand experience), but it's vastly superior to Kubuntu, and I'm a KDE person.
The problem with Apollo was that although the economic benefit was 10 times the expense, the people that benefited were often not the same people that invested the money. Sure the investors got some money in the form of royalties, but on the whole it made a lot of people other than NASA rich. No private company has the resources to do the Apollo project, nor would it be advisable to do so if one did. That company just wouldn't see the returns in a reasonable time frame, if ever. Probably one of the most valuable outcomes was the number of kids it inspired to study science and engineering, that doesn't benefit the original investor at all (maybe it supplied their labour in 20 years, but that's just too far out once again).
The difference is that if we as a society invest we both have the funds and we all benefit. Spending our money to inspire those young minds drives our economy, and keeps everyone employed. This includes the people that build the things the engineers design.
I would also like to point out that the GP referenced transit, not just public transit. Roads are built with public money. I don't think a network of toll roads is desirable, and it prevents an integrated planning approach. I can continue for other issues, but it's really all the same, there are advantages to working together.
As for the argument that taxes force people to give up their money, as long as people are free to move out of the country that isn't true. There are states in this world that don't tax, but I don't see a flood of people moving. These states are states that people don't want to move to, and I wonder why. Might it be that the absence of government leads to warlords and anarchy?
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Maybe not, but I have a BB10 phone already. It's a pretty decent device, re-written from the ground up, natively supports ActiveSync, etc. Don't judge it based on old BlackBerrys.
I've been doing BB development for a few years and they've never required business plans, don't know what happened there. Registering for App World requires a scan of government photo ID, most people use their driver's license or passport. It's human reviewed so it takes a couple days but it's pretty painless. All the notarized form requirements are gone. The signing keys are free now and just require an email. The entire process has actually become quite painless, and BB10 is actually a nice platform to develop for. All BBOS development has left me wanting to smash my phone, but BB10 development I'll do for fun.
You are aware they have zero debt and are sitting on over a billion in cash and growing? Yes, growing their cash, even this quarter with all the doom and gloom. You have a very interesting definition of "bleeding money out their assholes". They're also adding subscribers, total number of people with active BlackBerrys is at an all time high. They have their issues but they're not going to be filing for bankruptcy tomorrow, despite common perception.
in any Blackberry I've ever owned or seen in smoothness, intuitiveness, app switching, ecosystem, and whatever else you can think of.
There is a key qualified there, that you've "owned or seen". The new BB7 devices really don't get the credit they should have and very few people know them. Everyone seems to have missed that RIM changed their UI over to 60fps hardware accelerated rendering. The result is an experience far smoother than the vast majority of Android devices. Things like pinch zoom in the browser are as smooth as iOS.
I'm not going to tell you that BlackBerry has a ton of apps, I'd be deluding myself. But the IM, email and social networking experience the GP was referring to is really unmatched by other platforms.
There's a difference between "can't afford" and "not willing to pay for". If you look at the US and government spending as a percentage of GDP ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Government_spending_as_a_percentage_of_GDP ) it's not that out of line with other countries. The problem is that taxation as a percentage of GDP hasn't kept up to pay for it all.
I'm not going to say the US shouldn't cut anything, but what to cut is really outside the scope of this and discussing it wouldn't end well. To point is just that, other economically successful countries (say Canada, which doesn't have a debt crisis) manage with governments that spend an even larger amount of money. The US could afford what it currently spends if it raised taxes to levels seen in many other developed countries, or even just close to those levels.
The Kindle Fire has half the RAM, half the storage of the PB base model, no cameras, no Bluetooth, single band WiFi, slower CPU/GPU, and lower quality (less accurate) touch screen. There may be other changes too, wouldn't be surprised if it was a lower quality LCD panel, the PB's is amazing and with that expensive.
RIM has been quite clear they're not abandoning the PlayBook, and have stated so officially on multiple occasions. Already there are starting to be rumours about a PlayBook 2. The OS on the PlayBook will power their next generation of phones, so they've got strong incentive to keep software development going. Despite all the bad press RIM remains quite profitable, making many hundreds of millions per year and selling over 40 million devices per year. They're not going to go bankrupt any time soon, and short of their bankruptcy the PlayBook won't be abandoned.
The thing about the PlayBook though is that it's already open enough you don't really need the root. What is this "unofficial code"? RIM already has a publicly available C/C++ Native SDK, they've even ported several open source apps and libraries themselves and made them available on Github. The PlayBook has also permitted sideloading since day one, so it's not even like you need RIM approval.
Don't expect Android to be loaded onto it, RIM has always used very secure locked bootloaders.
On the upside, OS 2.0 already has MKV support. It's in the developer beta.
Go to Menu -> Modules while in the applications list and you'll see every module. Opening up an application will also show you the modules for that application, and let you edit the app's permissions. I see everything that's an actual app my carrier (Rogers) has installed, and found the Rogers certificates. The VPLs (virtual pre-loads) are just homescreen bookmarks so they're not listed as apps until you open them and do the installation. Most things carriers push are just VPLs.
I should point out though that your carrier already knows what numbers you dialled and when you received messages. Anything that connects off device is obviously readable and loggable by them, BES of course excepted due to the encryption.
It does serve a useful purpose though. One, it provides push email service even for accounts only accessible over POP/IMAP/OWA. While obviously the push isn't instant, it does result in significant battery/data savings. It also enables compression, which I definitely appreciate when roaming. Compression also means better battery life.
You're right though that it doesn't strictly need to be there. I do think ActiveSync support is a good idea, and I do think we'll see it on BBX.
In either case my point wasn't really about the merits. In the years I've owned a BlackBerry I've only experienced two of those outages and they've been short enough. BlackBerry sure has its issues, but reliability is a pretty minor one.
It just means the app. Given Google's desire for Google Apps to be taken seriously in the enterprise I doubt the BES Connector will be discontinued any time soon.
Any device shipped in the last two years has either come with or is upgradeable to OS 6, meaning a WebKit browser. OS 7 actually has a pretty nice browser, the 60 fps hardware acceleration means it's much smoother than Android when scrolling/zooming. Pages also load quite fast. Okay, not quite as fast as the iPhone 4S, but an iPhone 4-like browsing experience is hardly "awful".
In the past decade RIM has had 3 big outages. While less than ideal it's not exactly an awful track record either. Any system inevitably has some downtime.
The newer BIS versions actually permit you to search remotely in the native client and access your full email history. In your inbox go Menu -> Search By -> Advanced. There's an On Device/Remotely option. Used to be exclusively BES, but that's changed. If you don't see it delete and re-add the account in the email setup app, some of the newer features require initial (automatic) setup steps.
@Pseudonym Authority With newer devices that limit has been increased 10x. I've never had a message be truncated. That limit doesn't include external images or attachments.
You can get a hosted BES/Exchange setup for a small fee. You have to have a trusted hosting provider in a country you consider safe.
Unlike many of the custom Android solutions being suggested on here, this requires an unmodified BlackBerry in a setup that is standard for pretty much any company. Having a setup which is highly customized for evading surveillance might work well, but if you're caught with it the consequences could be severe. Having something which is standard fare among business travellers makes you far less suspicious. Many oppressive regimes will throw you in jail even without being able to decrypt your data if they think it's suspicious enough.
As other posters have pointed out, RIM only provides access to BIS data. If you're running BES (an enterprise server) there's no way RIM can hand over your data. They've had the BES server software audited by independent agencies to confirm its security. Additionally, the on-device security is excellent. Unlike certain other mobile platforms there have been no attacks that can bypass the password lock screen. Additionally there's a full set of encryption and memory cleaning options.
Even back then, he was supporting many extreme leftist ideas and policies on the campaign trail...but, the majority of US citizens must have been missing it. I know I was.
I don't think Obama is extreme left, not even close, and I say that with full knowledge of his policies. On the US political spectrum he's left, neither extreme or moderate, but on a global political spectrum he's quite conservative. Health care reform, as originally proposed by him, still wouldn't have created a universal health care system. The US is the only developed country without one. There's plenty more examples, but I think you get my point. It's about local vs global context.
To the rest of the world, anyone farther right than "American centre-left" is a nutcase. I describe most Republican senators as "batshit insane" without any risk of offending people in Canada. Here even our most conservative major party supports a single-payer universal health care system.
A couple European countries haven't done so well, they're the ones in the news. Greek and Irish bailouts don't change the accomplishments of the rest of the continent. I also encourage you to look at little closer to home at Canada. In many ways we're farther left than Europe, and not so coincidentally have a very stable financial sector (Europe deregulated under US pressure, Canada didn't).
Remember, the rest of the developed world is politically left of the US. Globally there's more success stories than failures, and the US economy isn't looking so great these days.
There's also more than just the economy. I'd still take living in Ireland over living in the US. Any country where more than 5% of people think Sarah Palin is anything but a complete moron scares me.
But there's the thing, MobileMe. AFAIK there is no enterprise equivalent to MobileMe where it can be centrally managed. Also, two-way push sync with your e-mail server is the whole point of BES. It syncs just about everything on your phone with the equivalent Outlook (or whatever) features. It also provides end to end AES encryption, compared to the iPhone situation where the iPhone was reporting encryption when there wasn't any. That has rightfully so shaken the faith of a lot of security-minded people in the iPhone.
Yes, of course, that's why the Homebrew channel doesn't let you play burned games. That requires a modchip, and in the case of modchips you're probably right. Though I do think that consumers should have the right to make a backup copy of their media, a right which would supersede DRM protections. If I buy the argument that I'm licensing a game, then the physical media is meaningless to my license. If however I am purchasing the physical media, then I should have the right to edit it and copy it. I know which of these two publishers would prefer.
And BTW, the Wii doesn't even have enough internal memory for 1 Wii game, much less 150. WiiWare doesn't count, they're more like minigames.
Right now the competition is better. The rate that Bell (Qwest in your example) can charge the competition is regulated by the CRTC to costs + 15% profit margin. This whole article is about the CRTC removing that regulation, creating a situation like you have with Qwest where the independent ISPs will cost significantly more.
There are still DSL wholesalers, that use Telus's or Bell's last-mile infrastructure, but have their own transit/DNS/e-mail/etc. I'm with TekSavvy, which I know services both Bell and Telus areas. Otherwise I'm not sure about Telus, I live in Bell-land so I mostly know Bell-area ISPs. I think TekSavvy is the only one that services both Bell and Telus areas (Yak does, but they just re-sell TekSavvy).
Schools and police may be local responsibilities, but I doubt they're funded entirely by local taxes. Here, in Canada, smaller governments (provincial and local) charge taxes too but it doesn't come close to their expenditures. There's a significant funds transfer from upper level governments.
ER and hospitals are private expenditures in the US (should be or not is a different debate). But everything else on that list is funded by the government.
It's also not unreasonable that in this day and age as we ask for more from our governments that spending would grow. Setting up government websites and putting massive amounts of information online costs money, and that's just one example of a new expenditure. And it's not a bad one, websites have greatly increased access to government information.
I think that's exactly it, things like adding extra repositories, installing packages for really basic stuff. I find Mandriva just has that extra bit of polish in working right out of the box.
It has its rough edges in other areas, but on the whole I quite like it for desktop use. I'm technical enough to have no issue with a much more technical distro (and use them all the time for servers), but for my desktop I really like Mandriva's polish. The polish might be comparable to Ubuntu (not a ton of first hand experience), but it's vastly superior to Kubuntu, and I'm a KDE person.
The problem with Apollo was that although the economic benefit was 10 times the expense, the people that benefited were often not the same people that invested the money. Sure the investors got some money in the form of royalties, but on the whole it made a lot of people other than NASA rich. No private company has the resources to do the Apollo project, nor would it be advisable to do so if one did. That company just wouldn't see the returns in a reasonable time frame, if ever. Probably one of the most valuable outcomes was the number of kids it inspired to study science and engineering, that doesn't benefit the original investor at all (maybe it supplied their labour in 20 years, but that's just too far out once again).
The difference is that if we as a society invest we both have the funds and we all benefit. Spending our money to inspire those young minds drives our economy, and keeps everyone employed. This includes the people that build the things the engineers design.
I would also like to point out that the GP referenced transit, not just public transit. Roads are built with public money. I don't think a network of toll roads is desirable, and it prevents an integrated planning approach. I can continue for other issues, but it's really all the same, there are advantages to working together.
As for the argument that taxes force people to give up their money, as long as people are free to move out of the country that isn't true. There are states in this world that don't tax, but I don't see a flood of people moving. These states are states that people don't want to move to, and I wonder why. Might it be that the absence of government leads to warlords and anarchy?