Software Patents are broken, but can we really trust the opinion of someone who has a vested interest in Liberating Patents owned by their competitors.
I'm sure if we asked to liberate patents based on Google's IP, it would be a whole other ball game. The source code for Android 3.x still isn't freely available and the Source Code to Google's data mining algorithms aren't likely to be made open source any time soon.
Don't forget to mark them down further after 3 months.
Why is the Galaxy S 2 still considered relevant. It has been superseded by the Galaxy Nexus by Samsung. HTC, Motorola and every other 2-bit Phone manufacturer are getting ready to push out new devices too.
At least the 4S will be relevant in 8 months time. At least Apple will be releasing current software for (at least) the next 36 months.
It was being purchased by Normals who didn't care about having the latest and greatest.
The only chances the Galaxy S 2 has of being purchased by Normals is by either tricking them into buying it (I've seen Phone Resellers do this) or in the 'bargain bins' of cheap pre-paid alongside the iPhone 3GS (give it 3 months).
Also consider that Morphie Juice Packs are more readily available than replacement batteries for the Samsung Galaxy S 2 and the utility of a removable battery is pretty much negated.
the 4S has a nicer GPU but a weaker CPU, and still has a crappy 3.5" screen.
A Nicer GPU? Yes. A weaker CPU? Slower CPU, but the software is fully optimised for that CPU, therefore, you end up with better performance from less hardware. The reduced battery consumption is jolly good too. A crappy 3.5" screen? I can't see how a 960x640 IPS screen is crappier than 800x480 AMOLED screen. Being able to fit the bloody thing in your pocket is a bonus too.
Humans have lived in deserts before. Common Theory is that Homo Sapiens evolved in the grasslands of Africa and thrived in the deserts. Bedouin Arabs still roam the deserts of the Middle East.
Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars is (theoretically) the easiest to Terraform. It has lots of carbon dioxide and Water Ice, which (with the right bacteria) could be used to establish a carbon-based ecosystem. It's Day is only a half-hour or so longer than 24 hours so it wouldn't be too much of a cultural shock for our frail human bodies to adapt to.
Lot's of Science Fiction discuss the colonisation and terraforming of Mars. Some Future Fantasy, some Hard S.F. I recommend reading Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The Trilogy discusses the Political, Geological, Biological and Physical Sciences of Intra-Solar-system, Extra-Terrestrial Colonisation.
Consumer Retail experiences are similar. The box is the same. The contents are the same. The Retail Displays are the same. The UI's are the same. (Vanilla Android has a distinctive UI. TouchWiz is as close to iOS as someone could get. Even HTC Sense has distinctive idiosyncrasies which differentiate it from iOS.)
A Moron in a Hurry could quite easily believe a Salesman that the Galaxy Tab was actually an iPad.
The one that didn't play Shockwave Flash is the iPad. The one that got very hot, drained the battery and crashed was either a Touchpad or the Galaxy Tab.
A few months ago, Harvey Norman (a large Australian Retail Chain - think Best Buy down under) had an exclusive on the HP TouchPads.
They were going for a big Push on the weekend, with discounts of over $100 off List price. They had billboards at Bus Stops and had reserved prime advertising space in the big Daily Newspapers for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
On the Thursday before, Leo killed the Touchpad.
The Harvey Norman group decided to retaliate by selling their entire stock of HP Products at Cost. They replaced their Newspaper Ads with iPad Ads including the slogan "The only Tablet you would want to buy". They also surplussed other electronic goods at or below cost price. (I picked up a Sony Blu-Ray player for less that AU$100.00).
WebM is not a documented standard; The standard is the implementation. Google can change the implementation at any time and the standard follows. H.264 is a documented standard; anyone can write their implementation and as long as it adheres to the standard, it can be called a H.264 codec.
The problem with documented standards is their lack of flexibility. It is also their greatest advantage. That is why there are always new versions of standards: HMTL, HTML2, HTML3, xhtml, HTML4, HTML5; MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, etc. WebM is too dynamic, or has the potential to be dynamic. This is a huge disadvantage in a standard.
The Patent Pool isn't to kill WebM, it is to protect those who choose to use WebM from litigation.
Maybe if Apple, Microsoft and Google provided a similar Patent Pool to their mobile developers, for a nominal fee, we wouldn't see all these Patent Trolls. A licence to a patent pool is better than paying Protection Money to a dozen different extortionists.
While OpenStack and Xen.org may be viable investments, they will have to find a way to get a return on their investments. As long as they don't kill off their Linux-based server products, they could really benefit from a competitive and strategic advantage.
Android investment? Huge Legal liability, as Google is finding out from Sun currently. It could also be a huge white elephant. No-one is seeing ROI in their involvement with Android. It could be argued that Android isn't open source either
If you get an ARM Windows 8 Tablet (running Windows 8 SoC Edition), it will *only* be able to support the Metro version of IE10.
This could mean that either Metro will be the preferred App Development technology since it will run on all versions of Windows 8 (unlike legacy technologies like Win32,.NET, Silverlight and Flash), or Windows 8 Tablets running on ARM System-on-a-Chips will be a stillborn concept and the iPad will continue to dominate the Tablet Market.
This is going to rely heavily on Developers accepting Metro. Considering that they are only starting to use.NET, It could be the number one reason for Windows 8 Tablets failing.
Native h.264 streaming will only be available on devices that don't support Flash Plugins (iOS Devices.)
Adobe have a lot of money tied up in pushing Flash users to Advertisers, so they will encourage the installation of Flash on any device that is potentially capable of installing it.
Smartphones that run Android, but don't support Flash (such as pre 2.2 Froyo devices), such as most of the Android devices in circulation are likely to still be excluded from watching Streaming "Flash" Video. Likewise, people with clean installs of Mac OS X Lion and Windows 7 will not be able to play Flash Video until they install Adobe Flash Plugin, or use Chrome with the embedded Flash Plugin. While all major (and most minor) Windows OEMs bundle Adobe Flash Player, it isn't included with Windows like it used to be in the days of Macromedia.
Looks like iOS's lack of Adobe Flash support is now definitely a positive feature, and not a negative bug.
Console Gaming is on the decline anyway. While the PS3, XBox360 and Wii are great systems on their own, Sony, Nintendo and even Microsoft are still dinosaurs of the Gaming industry.
PS3 sales have been inflated by the fact that it was the best value BluRay Player on the market for years. Now, sub-$200 BluRay Players are making the $400 PS3 look more like the niche product that it is.
While the Kinect has boosted XBox sales almost as much as the Red-Ring-Of-Death did, it is still a fad. People are using their Kinect for niche tasks like 3D-imaging rather than gaming. The Kinect was one of Make:Magazines most Hackable Gadgets, and that could a major factor in driving sales of what is still a niche product.
Wii Fit has made the Wii the "housewife's second-best-friend" of gaming consoles and has inflated sales as well. Once again, it is turning out to be just a fad. It is the most consumer-friendly gaming console of the big three, which explains it's much higher sales figures, but it is still of limited appeal to the average consumer.
While their always will be Dead-beat stoners who spend their profits from their hydroponic operation to continue buying XBox's and PS3, as well as high-pressure professionals who want some mindless downtime when they get home from work, Console gaming is not where it's at at the moment. I doubt their will be much of a Console Gaming comeback in the future either.
In GSM-only markets, like Australia and parts of Europe, where all carriers had the iPhone at the same time, Android Phone market share is only marginally better than Android Tablet market share.
The increases in Android sales coincided with supply issues of iPhones. People would only buy Android phones when they couldn't get and iPhone and *needed* a phone now.
Like in the US however, Android Phones do come with ridiculous amounts of Google, Carrier and Manufacturer Crapware. iPhones only come with Apple Crapware of iTunes Store, App Store and the useless Yahoo Weather and Stocks Apps and the not-quite-so-useless YouTube and Google Maps Apps.
The Fad of the "App" is one reason. The exposure provided by the iTunes App Store is another.
The number one reason, however is Ease of Content Protection. Before iOS, content distributors who didn't want their content subsumed had to use Flash to regulate content distribution. Viewers outside the US couldn't view Hulu. Collectors couldn't download and create their own library of Videos. Text couldn't be copied wholesale.
iOS changed this by not including Flash and being successful. Content distributors were forced to either create Web Apps and expose their content to their users without any content protection, not service the largest growing market for their content, or create Native Apps which would keep their content stream locked down. The iOS "Walled Garden" ensured that users couldn't modify the content protection chain, and their content was safe.
$600 laptops are cheap laptops, but not inexpensive laptops.
First of all, they are poorly manufactured, as you've experienced. They may not even physically last the 1 year of their manufacturers warranty. Any damage due to neglect (even if poor engineering is a major contributing factor) won't be covered by the manufacturer.
Secondly, they generally only have Windows Home or Starter, which makes them useless if you are planning on using it for anything other than FaceBook and Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail, or gMail, or whatever). (Windows Business or Ultimate is an extra expense).
Thirdly is the Crapware. Manufacturers include Crapware for three reasons; Mindshare, Kickbacks and Spyware. If every time you *attempt* to connect to a wireless network you have to see a full-screen Asus logo splash screen, you are giving the company mindshare. If you are railroaded to pay for McAfee Security subscriptions, you are giving the company kickbacks. If the manufacturer (or Distributor) includes software to make it easier for them to maintain your data for you (IE. spy on you), you are giving the company your information.
While IT professionals can build their own desktop computer, we are forced to rely on third parties to make our laptops. If something breaks on our laptops, very few of us can fix them ourselves. I recommend purchasing a laptop from a professional vendor and paying for a professional's laptop. Extended manufacturers warranties are generally worth the paper they're written on (unlike store warranties) and your Credit Card or Home Insurance may provide insurance against accidental damage.
It depends on the quality and efficiency of the "Firewall", especially on a Portable Device. Even well known Security Software may be inappropriate in certain situations.
If the Software can't detect new threats (out-of-date definitions, no dynamic threat control) it is pointless having. If the Software is constantly running in the background, consuming CPU cycles, RAM, network bandwidth and Battery, it is less than useless; it is a liability.
Software solutions that get bundled with an OS in return for some financial kickback to the device manufacturer (Crapware) have no incentive to add value to the UX, so are generally detrimental to the UX. I'm not saying that McAfee's software solutions are Crapware, but it is likely that Sony-Ericsson did receive a financial incentive to include their product.
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Software Patents are broken, but can we really trust the opinion of someone who has a vested interest in Liberating Patents owned by their competitors.
I'm sure if we asked to liberate patents based on Google's IP, it would be a whole other ball game. The source code for Android 3.x still isn't freely available and the Source Code to Google's data mining algorithms aren't likely to be made open source any time soon.
Don't forget to mark them down further after 3 months.
Why is the Galaxy S 2 still considered relevant. It has been superseded by the Galaxy Nexus by Samsung. HTC, Motorola and every other 2-bit Phone manufacturer are getting ready to push out new devices too.
At least the 4S will be relevant in 8 months time. At least Apple will be releasing current software for (at least) the next 36 months.
It was being purchased by Normals who didn't care about having the latest and greatest.
The only chances the Galaxy S 2 has of being purchased by Normals is by either tricking them into buying it (I've seen Phone Resellers do this) or in the 'bargain bins' of cheap pre-paid alongside the iPhone 3GS (give it 3 months).
OMFG bad reporting!
CLARIFY, CLARIFY!!
Shipped != Sold.
Galaxy S 2: 125.3 mm x 66.1 mm x 9.91 mm (8.49mm thick in some places)
iPhone 4S: 115.2 mm x 58.66 mm x 9.3 mm
Question 1: Since when was 9.91mm less than 9.3mm?
http://blog.gsmarena.com/the-apple-iphone-4-declared-slimmer-than-the-samsung-galaxy-s-ii/
Question 2: Since when was the volume of the Galaxy S 2 (over 700) less than the iPhone 4S (less than 630), even taking into consideration the banana shape of the Samsung?
Also consider that Morphie Juice Packs are more readily available than replacement batteries for the Samsung Galaxy S 2 and the utility of a removable battery is pretty much negated.
the 4S has a nicer GPU but a weaker CPU, and still has a crappy 3.5" screen.
A Nicer GPU? Yes.
A weaker CPU? Slower CPU, but the software is fully optimised for that CPU, therefore, you end up with better performance from less hardware. The reduced battery consumption is jolly good too.
A crappy 3.5" screen? I can't see how a 960x640 IPS screen is crappier than 800x480 AMOLED screen. Being able to fit the bloody thing in your pocket is a bonus too.
Humans have lived in deserts before. Common Theory is that Homo Sapiens evolved in the grasslands of Africa and thrived in the deserts. Bedouin Arabs still roam the deserts of the Middle East.
Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars is (theoretically) the easiest to Terraform. It has lots of carbon dioxide and Water Ice, which (with the right bacteria) could be used to establish a carbon-based ecosystem. It's Day is only a half-hour or so longer than 24 hours so it wouldn't be too much of a cultural shock for our frail human bodies to adapt to.
Lot's of Science Fiction discuss the colonisation and terraforming of Mars. Some Future Fantasy, some Hard S.F. I recommend reading Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The Trilogy discusses the Political, Geological, Biological and Physical Sciences of Intra-Solar-system, Extra-Terrestrial Colonisation.
Your not a Typesetter or designer. You don't need to know the difference.
A Lawyer arguing that two things are significantly different should be able to tell the bloody things apart.
The 0.3MP FaceTime camera of the iPad 2 was copied from the iPhone 4 and the 4th Generation iPod Touch.
The 1.3MP Front-facing camera of the Galaxy Tab is a completely different camera. It has more Megapixels and fewer lenses.
Consumer Retail experiences are similar.
The box is the same.
The contents are the same.
The Retail Displays are the same.
The UI's are the same. (Vanilla Android has a distinctive UI. TouchWiz is as close to iOS as someone could get. Even HTC Sense has distinctive idiosyncrasies which differentiate it from iOS.)
A Moron in a Hurry could quite easily believe a Salesman that the Galaxy Tab was actually an iPad.
and they were in a Hurry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry
The one that didn't play Shockwave Flash is the iPad.
The one that got very hot, drained the battery and crashed was either a Touchpad or the Galaxy Tab.
A few months ago, Harvey Norman (a large Australian Retail Chain - think Best Buy down under) had an exclusive on the HP TouchPads.
They were going for a big Push on the weekend, with discounts of over $100 off List price. They had billboards at Bus Stops and had reserved prime advertising space in the big Daily Newspapers for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
On the Thursday before, Leo killed the Touchpad.
The Harvey Norman group decided to retaliate by selling their entire stock of HP Products at Cost. They replaced their Newspaper Ads with iPad Ads including the slogan "The only Tablet you would want to buy". They also surplussed other electronic goods at or below cost price. (I picked up a Sony Blu-Ray player for less that AU$100.00).
WebM is not a documented standard; The standard is the implementation. Google can change the implementation at any time and the standard follows.
H.264 is a documented standard; anyone can write their implementation and as long as it adheres to the standard, it can be called a H.264 codec.
The problem with documented standards is their lack of flexibility. It is also their greatest advantage. That is why there are always new versions of standards: HMTL, HTML2, HTML3, xhtml, HTML4, HTML5; MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, etc.
WebM is too dynamic, or has the potential to be dynamic. This is a huge disadvantage in a standard.
The Patent Pool isn't to kill WebM, it is to protect those who choose to use WebM from litigation.
Maybe if Apple, Microsoft and Google provided a similar Patent Pool to their mobile developers, for a nominal fee, we wouldn't see all these Patent Trolls. A licence to a patent pool is better than paying Protection Money to a dozen different extortionists.
While OpenStack and Xen.org may be viable investments, they will have to find a way to get a return on their investments. As long as they don't kill off their Linux-based server products, they could really benefit from a competitive and strategic advantage.
Android investment? Huge Legal liability, as Google is finding out from Sun currently. It could also be a huge white elephant. No-one is seeing ROI in their involvement with Android. It could be argued that Android isn't open source either
If you get an ARM Windows 8 Tablet (running Windows 8 SoC Edition), it will *only* be able to support the Metro version of IE10.
This could mean that either Metro will be the preferred App Development technology since it will run on all versions of Windows 8 (unlike legacy technologies like Win32, .NET, Silverlight and Flash), or Windows 8 Tablets running on ARM System-on-a-Chips will be a stillborn concept and the iPad will continue to dominate the Tablet Market.
This is going to rely heavily on Developers accepting Metro. Considering that they are only starting to use .NET, It could be the number one reason for Windows 8 Tablets failing.
Not as far as we can tell.
Native h.264 streaming will only be available on devices that don't support Flash Plugins (iOS Devices.)
Adobe have a lot of money tied up in pushing Flash users to Advertisers, so they will encourage the installation of Flash on any device that is potentially capable of installing it.
Smartphones that run Android, but don't support Flash (such as pre 2.2 Froyo devices), such as most of the Android devices in circulation are likely to still be excluded from watching Streaming "Flash" Video.
Likewise, people with clean installs of Mac OS X Lion and Windows 7 will not be able to play Flash Video until they install Adobe Flash Plugin, or use Chrome with the embedded Flash Plugin. While all major (and most minor) Windows OEMs bundle Adobe Flash Player, it isn't included with Windows like it used to be in the days of Macromedia.
Looks like iOS's lack of Adobe Flash support is now definitely a positive feature, and not a negative bug.
Console Gaming is on the decline anyway.
While the PS3, XBox360 and Wii are great systems on their own, Sony, Nintendo and even Microsoft are still dinosaurs of the Gaming industry.
PS3 sales have been inflated by the fact that it was the best value BluRay Player on the market for years. Now, sub-$200 BluRay Players are making the $400 PS3 look more like the niche product that it is.
While the Kinect has boosted XBox sales almost as much as the Red-Ring-Of-Death did, it is still a fad. People are using their Kinect for niche tasks like 3D-imaging rather than gaming. The Kinect was one of Make:Magazines most Hackable Gadgets, and that could a major factor in driving sales of what is still a niche product.
Wii Fit has made the Wii the "housewife's second-best-friend" of gaming consoles and has inflated sales as well. Once again, it is turning out to be just a fad. It is the most consumer-friendly gaming console of the big three, which explains it's much higher sales figures, but it is still of limited appeal to the average consumer.
While their always will be Dead-beat stoners who spend their profits from their hydroponic operation to continue buying XBox's and PS3, as well as high-pressure professionals who want some mindless downtime when they get home from work, Console gaming is not where it's at at the moment. I doubt their will be much of a Console Gaming comeback in the future either.
In GSM-only markets, like Australia and parts of Europe, where all carriers had the iPhone at the same time, Android Phone market share is only marginally better than Android Tablet market share.
The increases in Android sales coincided with supply issues of iPhones. People would only buy Android phones when they couldn't get and iPhone and *needed* a phone now.
Like in the US however, Android Phones do come with ridiculous amounts of Google, Carrier and Manufacturer Crapware.
iPhones only come with Apple Crapware of iTunes Store, App Store and the useless Yahoo Weather and Stocks Apps and the not-quite-so-useless YouTube and Google Maps Apps.
I think T-Mobile was hurt more by the Microsoft Sidekick debacle than the iPhone.
The Fad of the "App" is one reason. The exposure provided by the iTunes App Store is another.
The number one reason, however is Ease of Content Protection.
Before iOS, content distributors who didn't want their content subsumed had to use Flash to regulate content distribution. Viewers outside the US couldn't view Hulu. Collectors couldn't download and create their own library of Videos. Text couldn't be copied wholesale.
iOS changed this by not including Flash and being successful. Content distributors were forced to either create Web Apps and expose their content to their users without any content protection, not service the largest growing market for their content, or create Native Apps which would keep their content stream locked down. The iOS "Walled Garden" ensured that users couldn't modify the content protection chain, and their content was safe.
$600 laptops are cheap laptops, but not inexpensive laptops.
First of all, they are poorly manufactured, as you've experienced. They may not even physically last the 1 year of their manufacturers warranty. Any damage due to neglect (even if poor engineering is a major contributing factor) won't be covered by the manufacturer.
Secondly, they generally only have Windows Home or Starter, which makes them useless if you are planning on using it for anything other than FaceBook and Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail, or gMail, or whatever). (Windows Business or Ultimate is an extra expense).
Thirdly is the Crapware. Manufacturers include Crapware for three reasons; Mindshare, Kickbacks and Spyware.
If every time you *attempt* to connect to a wireless network you have to see a full-screen Asus logo splash screen, you are giving the company mindshare.
If you are railroaded to pay for McAfee Security subscriptions, you are giving the company kickbacks.
If the manufacturer (or Distributor) includes software to make it easier for them to maintain your data for you (IE. spy on you), you are giving the company your information.
While IT professionals can build their own desktop computer, we are forced to rely on third parties to make our laptops. If something breaks on our laptops, very few of us can fix them ourselves. I recommend purchasing a laptop from a professional vendor and paying for a professional's laptop. Extended manufacturers warranties are generally worth the paper they're written on (unlike store warranties) and your Credit Card or Home Insurance may provide insurance against accidental damage.
It depends on the quality and efficiency of the "Firewall", especially on a Portable Device. Even well known Security Software may be inappropriate in certain situations.
If the Software can't detect new threats (out-of-date definitions, no dynamic threat control) it is pointless having.
If the Software is constantly running in the background, consuming CPU cycles, RAM, network bandwidth and Battery, it is less than useless; it is a liability.
Software solutions that get bundled with an OS in return for some financial kickback to the device manufacturer (Crapware) have no incentive to add value to the UX, so are generally detrimental to the UX.
I'm not saying that McAfee's software solutions are Crapware, but it is likely that Sony-Ericsson did receive a financial incentive to include their product.
http://xkcd.com/937/
This is a better one, but covers Tornadoes instead.