Yes, binary drivers can have their problems, WHEN THE ABI CHANGES!
Windows 32 and Windows 64 do not share a driver model. This is the source of your problem, not "binary drivers."
What if you have a device that had a well-performing Linux binary driver, that didn't "suck" (not all 3rd party drivers automatically suck you know) but the ABI changed? What if you had a device that had a GLP driver in-kernel, but the Linux dictators dropped it? You're more or less fucked. Maybe your use case, which I am guessing is ordinary desktop computing, has no need for anything beyond the standard drivers for devices you might find in a desktop computer. You are certainly in the majority. However, there are tons of obscure little widgets that a more alpha geek might want to use, but now can't because somebody decided that he can choose between a modern Linux kernel, or his precious device!
Yes, it'd be great if there were GPL kernel drivers for every bit of obscure hardware in the world. There aren't and even you admit that your 3D driver is binary, because as we all know the current GPL kernel drivers for 3D cards suck donkey ass.
That's not great. It's short sighted and causes considerable headaches for people with older devices.
If they'd sit down for a week and decide on a proper model, they wouldn't have to redesign it EVER. Solaris has kept the same ABI since the beginning, and pretty much every benchmark out there shows it equal to (sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind) Linux on the same hardware.
The real reason that the Linux dictators decided not to settle on an ABI is so they can try to pressure and force manufacturers to release their drivers as GPL software. This sounds good, and I'm sure their intentions are mostly pure, but many drivers will never be open sourced for various reasons, and so really the end result is shitty 3D acceleration and other bullshit poo-butt problems that would not exist if they would settle down on a driver model.
Listen, the "tablet" is just a form of computer. Apple has no enforced monopoly, and certainly isn't using abusive practices to horn in on Samsung.
There is an ecosystem full of would-be competition. The problem is, it sucks. Just sucks the shit off a gay horse's cock. Sucks it off so clean and dry, that you'd never know that Samsung was collectively out there in the field fucking cows in the ass.
The other thing to consider, is that nobody else is honest in their sales numbers. Samsung and the other would-be players don't say how many tablets they have sold - just how many have been released into the retail channel. That makes them look really good for a quarter or two, until it becomes clear that they can not afford to keep thousands of warehouses of these things around, and neither can Best Buy.
It's an iPad market, but nobody really needs a tablet so regulatory action is just a stupid thing to suggest at this point.
I think the other main issue I have with Android, (and you are correct about the native development, I will give you that, despite the fact that lots of stuff will still be slowing the whole system almost to a halt by using the Java tools) is that all Android devices have the most gay-ass names in the world. Sure, iPad, yeah, that's kind of a lame name. But Desire? Hero? They're fucking shitty knockoff phones that are mainly made of plastic, designed to fulfill a nice low market niche, and they are naming these things like they are RPG characters!
I was objecting to the idea that there's a "tablet market" when there really isn't. You could add up the yearly sales of all the other tablets in the world, and they wouldn't equal the weekly sales of the iPad.
Yes, I understand the demand for a tablet that can be handed out to children and others in third world countries, and I understand that the iPad just won't cut the mustard there when it represents several months or even over a year's income.
But the Android iPad clones I have played with, they feel cheap. They are plasticy, they are too bendy (yeah try to bend the iPad, that thing could double as a martial arts weapon) and they are generally pretty thick and clunky. Even many of the 7" models are greater in volume than the iPad 1, let alone the iPad 2.
I would like to see something come out that blew the iPad away, if only to force Apple to innovate even more and drop the price as well. However, there is no pretending that this is anybody's game right now. Apple owns it.
I did check it out. It is a total mess, and the form factor is too small. Not much bigger than a phone, too small for comfortable reading of PDFs. I didn't actually get to see if there was a good PDF reader that supported annotations, but it's a moot point anyway.
What's a Thrive? I haven't ever heard of it before you mentioned it.
I did look it up, and it's not even in the Wikipedia. Finally found it on Toshiba's web site, though. Looks like it's an extra-thick iPad clone with a pathetic 4 hour battery life (looks like you're going to need to get a few battery packs!).
Why oh why, didn't you just get a proper iPad, jailbreak it, and then run your Python apps on there? And don't give me any hokum about Android being "open source" - just try to get that source from Google.
I mean, iOS is just as open source as Android - you can get OpenDarwin which is everything below the UI layer of the iPad / iPhone too.
I will hand it to you, though - yours is both thicker and larger than mine. But I can go all day and all night, and you're limp after 4 hours.
Apple doesn't have an enforced monopoly on tablets. It's just that nobody in their right mind would buy anything but an iPad now, unless you work at HP or Microsoft or Google and have to eat your own dog food, or you are Richard Stallman.
Most of the iPad knockoffs have been produces in small batches, 50K, 100K, 250K, and they are literally rotting away on the shelves at best buy until the manufacturer gets desperate and lets them go for a hundred bucks or so. Apple is selling every iPad they can make, and they are making millions a month. They'd make more, but they literally bought up the entire capacity of a good subset of the world electronics industry, to get parts, and they are partnering with several firms in order to bring more factories online for producing basic electronics components, just so they can produce enough iPads to meet demand.
I mean, are you living in a cave, on Mars, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears? HP, the various Android tablets, Palm, RIM, they are not even playing the same game as Apple, let alone playing in the same league. They are all off playing kickball down at the city park, training for the Special Olympics, while Apple is playing in the Superbowl and the World Series and the World Cup and the Olympics and winning every one without even breaking a sweat.
At some point in the future, there probably will be a point where there are more non-Apple tablets sold per month than iPads, when taken in aggregate, but rather than making $150-300 per unit like Apple does on the iPad (and iPhone), it will again mirror the current situation where Samsung is bringing in like $4.50 per unit.
No, iPads are finding a place in business. You can wave your arms around in the air all you wish, and talk about a "tablet" market, but it's really just the iPad market.
Until somebody can come up with something that is both nicer than the iPad, and substantially cheaper, there is no tablet market. There's an iPad market and then there's iPad knockoffs (go ahead, take a fucking look at them!) which are either more expensive, or a total joke, or usually both.
Aside from the iPad, other tablets are selling at about the same rate they were 5, 10, and 15 years ago.
You know, you really could do some curls and work out with those little 1 pound, pink plastic weights that you see little girls using.
I have this gigantic, heavy, clunky iPad (1st gen) and if you can't smell my sarcasm and yes, disdain for your puny weak arms and hands from here you need to get your nose checked, as well as have your muscles looked at for signs of atrophy.
If you are severely handicapped, please forgive my rudeness. If not, you really, REALLY need to go outside and do some exercise.
I was watching him do the little demo and thinking to myself "Just what the fuck is going on here?"
It looks like there was a different group of people, maybe in different parts of the world, developing each bit of chrome and flash for the UI, without ever talking to each other or trying it all out at once to see what worked and what didn't. Then they drank it all down with some raw eggs and anchovies, and barfed it into a gigantic bowl, moaning "I'm DONE man!"
I don't understand how somebody who prefaces their defense of Android with "well if you root it and install some tweaked OS and some other bits of shit here and there, you can get it to be nice" could ever be seen as schooling anybody.
To be fair, your "facts" are just as unbelievable. Firstly, you don't out-smooth iOS. It's so smooth that there is never any perception of anything else. You may be able to fiddle around with your Android and jam some modified OS onto there, and make it smoother than the stuttering mess that is the out of box Android experience, but you will never convince anybody that it's smoother than iOS. NEVER. Even if your modified Android is somehow *nearly* as smooth as iOS, it is really yelling that you had to put your own modified OS and shit on there to get it that way. People don't generally do that, and what counts is out of box smoothness.
Second, Objective-C, despite being what you claim is a nightmare to program for, has so many top notch applications that your claim falls flat on its ass. You can program in C / C++ for Android, but you're still running everything through Goggle's ripoff virtual machine, with no performance benefit over using Java. If your iOS programming buddy tells you to first get a webview, he may just not be the most awesome programmer ever.
The irony, again, is that your hyperbolic anecdotes (I won't outright call them lies, at least not yet) are indefensible and ridiculous, and despite this, unconvincing.
At least you didn't tout the massive computing horsepower of the newer Android phones, which of course is necessary to keep the Java Virtual Machine going at any kind of a reasonable pace.
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Yes, binary drivers can have their problems, WHEN THE ABI CHANGES!
Windows 32 and Windows 64 do not share a driver model. This is the source of your problem, not "binary drivers."
What if you have a device that had a well-performing Linux binary driver, that didn't "suck" (not all 3rd party drivers automatically suck you know) but the ABI changed? What if you had a device that had a GLP driver in-kernel, but the Linux dictators dropped it? You're more or less fucked. Maybe your use case, which I am guessing is ordinary desktop computing, has no need for anything beyond the standard drivers for devices you might find in a desktop computer. You are certainly in the majority. However, there are tons of obscure little widgets that a more alpha geek might want to use, but now can't because somebody decided that he can choose between a modern Linux kernel, or his precious device!
Yes, it'd be great if there were GPL kernel drivers for every bit of obscure hardware in the world. There aren't and even you admit that your 3D driver is binary, because as we all know the current GPL kernel drivers for 3D cards suck donkey ass.
That's not great. It's short sighted and causes considerable headaches for people with older devices.
If they'd sit down for a week and decide on a proper model, they wouldn't have to redesign it EVER. Solaris has kept the same ABI since the beginning, and pretty much every benchmark out there shows it equal to (sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind) Linux on the same hardware.
The real reason that the Linux dictators decided not to settle on an ABI is so they can try to pressure and force manufacturers to release their drivers as GPL software. This sounds good, and I'm sure their intentions are mostly pure, but many drivers will never be open sourced for various reasons, and so really the end result is shitty 3D acceleration and other bullshit poo-butt problems that would not exist if they would settle down on a driver model.
The problem is that Linux will not settle on a stable ABI. The Linux driver model is tainted crap.
I guess you're trying to be clever, but 10 bit color means 10 bits per pixel these days.
You can be forgiven because it is all too obvious that you don't know your head from your ass.
They should just concentrate on the one really profitable thing they do - making ink.
Or they should just sell off their assets, and then pay the shareholders off.
Listen, the "tablet" is just a form of computer. Apple has no enforced monopoly, and certainly isn't using abusive practices to horn in on Samsung.
There is an ecosystem full of would-be competition. The problem is, it sucks. Just sucks the shit off a gay horse's cock. Sucks it off so clean and dry, that you'd never know that Samsung was collectively out there in the field fucking cows in the ass.
The other thing to consider, is that nobody else is honest in their sales numbers. Samsung and the other would-be players don't say how many tablets they have sold - just how many have been released into the retail channel. That makes them look really good for a quarter or two, until it becomes clear that they can not afford to keep thousands of warehouses of these things around, and neither can Best Buy.
It's an iPad market, but nobody really needs a tablet so regulatory action is just a stupid thing to suggest at this point.
Yes but Android is no longer open source.
The Transformer did 400,000 total, and this isn't sales, it's shipments to retail channels.
Yes, the iPad is doing more in a week than the others are doing in a year, because the Transformer is still sitting at 400K units, total production.
I think the other main issue I have with Android, (and you are correct about the native development, I will give you that, despite the fact that lots of stuff will still be slowing the whole system almost to a halt by using the Java tools) is that all Android devices have the most gay-ass names in the world. Sure, iPad, yeah, that's kind of a lame name. But Desire? Hero? They're fucking shitty knockoff phones that are mainly made of plastic, designed to fulfill a nice low market niche, and they are naming these things like they are RPG characters!
Fuckin gay, dude, just like Android.
I was objecting to the idea that there's a "tablet market" when there really isn't. You could add up the yearly sales of all the other tablets in the world, and they wouldn't equal the weekly sales of the iPad.
Yes, I understand the demand for a tablet that can be handed out to children and others in third world countries, and I understand that the iPad just won't cut the mustard there when it represents several months or even over a year's income.
But the Android iPad clones I have played with, they feel cheap. They are plasticy, they are too bendy (yeah try to bend the iPad, that thing could double as a martial arts weapon) and they are generally pretty thick and clunky. Even many of the 7" models are greater in volume than the iPad 1, let alone the iPad 2.
I would like to see something come out that blew the iPad away, if only to force Apple to innovate even more and drop the price as well. However, there is no pretending that this is anybody's game right now. Apple owns it.
I did check it out. It is a total mess, and the form factor is too small. Not much bigger than a phone, too small for comfortable reading of PDFs. I didn't actually get to see if there was a good PDF reader that supported annotations, but it's a moot point anyway.
The point of showing a new windows from "back there" in Lion is to inform the user a new window was created.
If your window is in a different space, and you switch to it, the whole UI slides in from the side that your window is on.
Easy.
I don't own a single Android device and don't really care, on a personal level.
On a broader level, it just shows that Google merely talks the open source talk without walking the walk.
Forgive me for asking this, but why would you buy something like the Playbook when the iPad is a known good system? Are you just anti-Apple or what?
What's a Thrive? I haven't ever heard of it before you mentioned it.
I did look it up, and it's not even in the Wikipedia. Finally found it on Toshiba's web site, though. Looks like it's an extra-thick iPad clone with a pathetic 4 hour battery life (looks like you're going to need to get a few battery packs!).
Why oh why, didn't you just get a proper iPad, jailbreak it, and then run your Python apps on there? And don't give me any hokum about Android being "open source" - just try to get that source from Google.
I mean, iOS is just as open source as Android - you can get OpenDarwin which is everything below the UI layer of the iPad / iPhone too.
I will hand it to you, though - yours is both thicker and larger than mine. But I can go all day and all night, and you're limp after 4 hours.
Apple doesn't have an enforced monopoly on tablets. It's just that nobody in their right mind would buy anything but an iPad now, unless you work at HP or Microsoft or Google and have to eat your own dog food, or you are Richard Stallman.
Most of the iPad knockoffs have been produces in small batches, 50K, 100K, 250K, and they are literally rotting away on the shelves at best buy until the manufacturer gets desperate and lets them go for a hundred bucks or so. Apple is selling every iPad they can make, and they are making millions a month. They'd make more, but they literally bought up the entire capacity of a good subset of the world electronics industry, to get parts, and they are partnering with several firms in order to bring more factories online for producing basic electronics components, just so they can produce enough iPads to meet demand.
I mean, are you living in a cave, on Mars, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears? HP, the various Android tablets, Palm, RIM, they are not even playing the same game as Apple, let alone playing in the same league. They are all off playing kickball down at the city park, training for the Special Olympics, while Apple is playing in the Superbowl and the World Series and the World Cup and the Olympics and winning every one without even breaking a sweat.
At some point in the future, there probably will be a point where there are more non-Apple tablets sold per month than iPads, when taken in aggregate, but rather than making $150-300 per unit like Apple does on the iPad (and iPhone), it will again mirror the current situation where Samsung is bringing in like $4.50 per unit.
No, iPads are finding a place in business. You can wave your arms around in the air all you wish, and talk about a "tablet" market, but it's really just the iPad market.
Until somebody can come up with something that is both nicer than the iPad, and substantially cheaper, there is no tablet market. There's an iPad market and then there's iPad knockoffs (go ahead, take a fucking look at them!) which are either more expensive, or a total joke, or usually both.
Aside from the iPad, other tablets are selling at about the same rate they were 5, 10, and 15 years ago.
You know, you really could do some curls and work out with those little 1 pound, pink plastic weights that you see little girls using.
I have this gigantic, heavy, clunky iPad (1st gen) and if you can't smell my sarcasm and yes, disdain for your puny weak arms and hands from here you need to get your nose checked, as well as have your muscles looked at for signs of atrophy.
If you are severely handicapped, please forgive my rudeness. If not, you really, REALLY need to go outside and do some exercise.
The thing isn't even shipping yet.
How courageous of you to not only tell everybody specifically what they got wrong, but posting as an AC as well?
Hats off to you, a Superman among men. We really ought to kiss your feet or the corner of your robes.
I was watching him do the little demo and thinking to myself "Just what the fuck is going on here?"
It looks like there was a different group of people, maybe in different parts of the world, developing each bit of chrome and flash for the UI, without ever talking to each other or trying it all out at once to see what worked and what didn't. Then they drank it all down with some raw eggs and anchovies, and barfed it into a gigantic bowl, moaning "I'm DONE man!"
I don't understand how somebody who prefaces their defense of Android with "well if you root it and install some tweaked OS and some other bits of shit here and there, you can get it to be nice" could ever be seen as schooling anybody.
To be fair, your "facts" are just as unbelievable. Firstly, you don't out-smooth iOS. It's so smooth that there is never any perception of anything else. You may be able to fiddle around with your Android and jam some modified OS onto there, and make it smoother than the stuttering mess that is the out of box Android experience, but you will never convince anybody that it's smoother than iOS. NEVER. Even if your modified Android is somehow *nearly* as smooth as iOS, it is really yelling that you had to put your own modified OS and shit on there to get it that way. People don't generally do that, and what counts is out of box smoothness.
Second, Objective-C, despite being what you claim is a nightmare to program for, has so many top notch applications that your claim falls flat on its ass. You can program in C / C++ for Android, but you're still running everything through Goggle's ripoff virtual machine, with no performance benefit over using Java. If your iOS programming buddy tells you to first get a webview, he may just not be the most awesome programmer ever.
The irony, again, is that your hyperbolic anecdotes (I won't outright call them lies, at least not yet) are indefensible and ridiculous, and despite this, unconvincing.
At least you didn't tout the massive computing horsepower of the newer Android phones, which of course is necessary to keep the Java Virtual Machine going at any kind of a reasonable pace.
You need much higher performance when your entire OS is Java based.
iOS is C based so it can naturally get by on much lighter hardware.
Yeah, Google doesn't want shitty Chinese tablets spoiling their image.
But that's the deal with open source - if you have an open source software package, people will use it for things you might not approve of.