Well I gave my boys their own PCs around 8 or 9, somewhere in there, but to be fair I was working at a PC shop at the time and we had shitloads of the Compaq SFF deskpro so it was easy enough to just get the boss to hand me a couple.
I'd say the way to teach kids about computers is the carrot and not the stick. Too many people try to overload them and make it as boring as any other class and just kill the fun. I loaded them up with emulators filled with killer games and when they asked "How can this play NES games without it being a NES? And where is the cartridge?" it was THEN that I started explaining how one chip could be emulated by another, and how they were all computers.
Kids are curious creatures so you expose them and soon enough they'll be the ones asking the questions. Because there was all that "ZOMFG DOOM teaches kids to be killers!" crap in the news I used that as a perfect excuse to give a lesson, so I stuck their pictures on the walls of a DOOM level. Of course they thought that was cool as hell and wanted to know how I did trhat. That led to a nice long lesson on how to edit games, and how games at their heart are nothing but collections of skins and artwork that when put together give the illusion of enemies smart enough to dodge you. It was quite educational and instead of being bored they were rapid firing questions a mile a minute.
So whatever you do make it FUN and let them come to YOU, don't try to force it down their throats. That way they are learning at their own pace and aren't overloaded with ideas they aren't ready for.
Well I think I know what the problem is, and I have a solution...Basic and Premium. You see Android is right now competing in TWO markets instead of one, you have 2.x taking over the feature phone and cheap tablet market and you have 3.x and later competing in the smartphone and premium tablet market.
So frankly what they need is brand differentiation, a way to sell feature phones and premium units without forcing devs to go for the lowest common denominator. this is one area where they can learn from MSFT, let those that care about cheap above all have the Android Basic while those that want the full experience can buy premium units. As a bonus they could divide up their marketing data between those two so that devs could see what kind of apps sell to which kinds of users and could better target their apps to the correct demographic.
But while I think your backport idea is nice i just have to wonder how well it would work with something like that $135 Android phone i linked to. Backporting the APIs really won't help if it makes any apps that use them run like Crysis on a Pentium 3, and since the 2.x market is obviously the razor thin low end market I think the better way to go would be to split it off, just as you get Windows basic with the low end desktops and netbooks and premium for the better equipped stuff. this would also let the customer know at a glance which ones will be updated and which won't so if they want updates? Choose premium devices, don't? Then buy a Basic device and be happy with what it comes with or the Basic market where the apps are designed around low end chips.
All in all I think this would be the most logical solution, would give Google some control, and wouldn't be dependent on the ODMs to keep up if they are gonna be targeting the low end market anyway. Because lets face it trying to run the modern APIs on one of those $79 tablets would just be painful , better to let them stick with 2.x and when the higher end chips drop they can always make 3.x the next Basic.
Well if its backlit there goes that idea, i'll have to buy her the previous model...which I'm sure I can find on sale somewhere, so it'll all even out in the wash. I'm shocked that the modders haven't already hacked the things though with the prices so low it seems like a perfect target for some cyanogenmod kinda goodness.
In the end all the thing is gonna do is read books, that's it, no surfing, no chat, all mom would ever use one for is to buy and read her cheesy horror books so hopefully the previous one ought to cut the mustard for that job.
Riiight, should I address everyone as nigger fuckwit instead? Its called being polite dumbass, which sadly in this day and age qualifies as a superpower.
And thanks for showing you know exactly jack and shit,because I have NEVER, repeat NEVER, gotten an ad from Amazon emails that wasn't based on things I had bought or searched for so even when I didn't buy they at least interested me enough to look.
So keep right on running your adblock, flashblock and cockblock and then be SHOCKED, shocked i tell you! When they give you ads for tampons and adult diapers. The rest of us? Like saving money on our shopping. hell I haven't paid retail for shit in over 3 years now, why should I when I can just wait for a heads up when its on sale?
Why do you go to a doctor? why don't you go to med school and DIY dumbass? Because THAT is how fricking stupid that argument is, like I should have to go spend 4 years to get a comp-sci degree or pay out the ass, which BTW we are talking millions of dollars, just to get the devs to show even a tiny amount of common sense. BTW that is excuse #7 on the list so if you are gonna trot out the classic please go to TM repo and just use the list, thanks.
Oooor...I can do like the rest of the planet, spend a whole $40 for Windows or buy a new Mac and have a hassle free computer...see the problem friend? if you want your OS to remain at 1.05% which for a product being given away gratis against two products that cost actual money is just pathetic, then please, by all means, be as fiddly and big a PITA as you wanna be. But don't come whining and bitching about how 'Ohhh, they won't give us the code! Waah, they won't support us! Boo, its a conspiracy to keep real software off of Linux!" because the rest of us will just laugh and walk away.
In the end you have a PRODUCT, there is a MARKET and in that market you have COMPETITION, if you want to be a hobbyist OS? Then please STFU and be one already! But quit bitching that nobody will take your fiddly OS if you refuse to give the customer what they want because frankly it makes you and the rest of the community look batshit.
Just to make it perfectly clear i'll bold this so you can't miss it The world won't do things YOUR way, you have to do things THEIR way and its as simple as that. The world doesn't give a rat's ass about how bleeding edge your damned kernel is, nor do they give a wet fart about "the power of CLI" which just FYI a primitive GUI and NOT the force, mmmkay?
BTW what do Best Buy, MSI, Asus, walmart, and me have in common? We are ALL retailers who bought into your bullshit only to find a broken OS and now won't allow it into our stores, so its not like I'm alone, in fact I'm in good company I'd say.
But as another poster said you're missing the forest for the wood. the question is WHY aren't they updating? The answer is simple, these units are CCC which means the thinnest of razor thin margins, which makes it simply not financially feasible to update most of these things, if there are even drivers for the older/shittier chips these units use.
Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about which is VERY popular here BTW. We are talking about a $135 Android smartphone, runs 2.3, and service is $50 a month for unlimited everything. You see these things all over the place here, there is no contract, the web surfing is good, it has a nice selection of built in apps. No do you REALLY think they are making enough profit on a $135 no contract phone to make paying devs to update it worth the expense? Hell I bet the users don't even fricking download or buy apps from the market, instead just using what came with the phone!
This is the little secret nobody wants to admit here, that the reason Android is stomping iPhone is that for every $500 Android phone you have 30 of the $135 models being sold. Sure that means a lot of Android users, but those users are using it as a cheap feature phone NOT as a true smartphone. they aren't downloading or buying apps, they don't care about updates, as long as the stuff that comes with the phone works they are happy little campers.
Don't get me wrong, I've tried a friends unit and it does what you'd want a basic phone to do, surf, email, music, its not a bad phone. But one shouldn't be surprised that phones like that simply aren't getting updated, Android has simply taken the feature phone market Symbian used to have with 2.x, that's all.
Actually put me in charge and old Hairyfeet would fix this shit RIGHT quick,copyrights too, ready? "Use it or lose it". You'd have X amount of time to actually have a product for sale, at a market competitive price and reasonable number of locations (to keep them from making a one off and asking $10 million for it just to say they had a product) or your patents and copyrights would go straight to PD, and no getting it back out either. that would get rid of those buying patents just to troll, buying IP away from devs only to never do anything with it, it would make the world a better place for you and me.
Oh Lord don't say that! Don't even joke that! Do you know how many damned times I've had to recover fricking passwords? I even once had to make a rush service call to another city 40 miles away because the Sally Secretary had changed the password on the mission critical billing system and then went off to lunch and promptly forgot it!
Since this was like the fourth time I'd been called out for this particular Sally secretary I asked the owner "If she keeps costing you service calls and missed hours, why don't you fire her?" and he got this wistful look on his face and said "Oh God I'd love to, but my wife and son would kill me, seeing as how she's my daughter in law and all"...ouch.
A good rule of thumb for a killer password that is uncrackable and you can't lose? Just use the serial of something you'll always own. Hell I've had customers that simply used the serial number off the keyboard or the tower so if they forgot all they had to do was lean over and look. I prefer using the serial numbers off my basses myself, i never sell my instruments and that gives you a huge string of letters/numbers/symbols, just perfect and if I ever forget just crack open the case and there it is.
Don't these things have an off switch? never owned one so I don't know, but as far as "killing your battery" from the pics I've seen we are talking static pictures, not some "punch the monkey to win an iPod!" flash mess. You could probably have a week's worth of them loaded in 5Mb of RAM and its not like you're gonna need any real CPU power to simply have a slideshow.
I am curious if anybody knows if these things can actually be turned off though, as I'm seriously thinking of getting one for my mom for XMas but she likes to read a little in bed before calling it a day so she'd need to kill it before she goes to sleep.
Tell me friend, are the ads targeted to you, like the ones in the Amazon emails? if so then I'd have NO problem with them, those ads have saved me probably a good grand in the past 2 years on things I was looking to buy anyway!
If ads are done right they can be really nice, its when the give you ads for crap you'd never buy in a million years that they suck. For example I recently bought a 32gb flash from Amazon for $16 with free shipping. I had been looking at flash drives so i got an email saying "Select flash drives 45% off today" and looked and they had the size i wanted for $8 less so I bought. Now why would an ad like that, that shows you only things you want to buy, bother anybody? That's why I signed up for the Tigerdirect and NewEgg emails, that way i don't buy anything list price anymore.
So i'm really curious as to what kind of ads they show. if they show only stuff that is connected to what you've previously bought I'll be picking up one of these for my mom for Xmas, she already loves the heads up she gets from Amazon when her favorite authors put out new books so targeted ads would be just fine for her, but if it shows you crap you'll never buy, like BBQ sets and baby diapers, then I can see saying screw it and buying the previous ad free version.
Well while they can regulate their own markets the problem is their money comes from exports and just as an American firm would be hard pressed to build devices cheap as Chinese, again because of slaves, lack of regulations, and the ability to just dump toxins out the back door, I have a feeling that the Chinese are likewise gonna find it tough to compete against someone in Malaysia that is getting paid 50c a day and whose rivers catch on fire.
That is the problem with countries like USA and China in the age of the multinationals, they can just keep hoping from one starving country to the next and keep polluting and thus kill any chance of competition. This is why the whole "educate the workforce!" bit turned out to be horseshit, as the multinationals found they could do the same thing with education they did with manufacturing in that they can hire an Indian or Chinese that paid peanuts for their degree and thus undercut you again.
Finally don't forget for every person in your workforce who can get a degree you are gonna have 7 that aren't smart enough, what do you do with these people now that you can hire a dozen in Malaysia for the price of a Big Mac? The Chinese are gonna find out, just as we did, that for every Chinese they can educate to an engineering level degree they are gonna have 30 that are only qualified to work in factories and other repetitive jobs, jobs that will be done in Malaysia because they will work for a bowl of rice and won't complain if the air looks like London of the 1800s.
Well you could solve that by saying "contains at least X amount" which next time you are in a store look at the mixed nuts as they already list "contains less than x amount of peanuts" on the label.
And I agree completely this is one of those areas where competition and the market would take care of it, those with better quality ingredients would brag while those that didn't would be looked upon as low quality, and again without having to list exactly what is in everything in what amounts.
Because the only people I've ever met that have actually cared about those labels are people who have allergies and all they are looking for is "does it have ANY of the stuff I'm allergic to?" so letting them protect their recipes by not listing amounts, just ingredients, would serve that function while letting people eat safely. And it is a pretty interesting discussion, something that most people never think about but is on every single thing they buy at the store.
But you just made my point for me friend, the people that are buying these cheap smartphones are happy with what they have on them and therefor shouldn't be the ones you are trying to market your apps to in the first place!
I have several friends on the Walmart "all you can use for $50, no contract" plans because they were tired of being screwed on minutes or SMS with their contracts and they are quite happy with what the phones came with. They are happy with the browser, the apps, the little time wasting games, i don't think that they have downloaded a single app from the appstore, not one. To them its a feature phone that does the web, just that simple.
To use a/. car analogy, it would be like saying "Toyota Camry is the #1 car so you should target your $6k a set rims at the Camry" which if the people that actually own a Camry don't buy $6k rims it really doesn't matter how many of them there are, does it?
The people running 2.x frankly don't give a shit about apps and appstores, they are happy with what is on the phone. I'd love to see the number of app sales from the Google appstore and see how many of them in the last year are from 2.x users because i bet no matter how many of them their are the amount of actual sales to those users is probably so low as to not matter, so why should devs target them?
Ooookay, maybe your drinking is giving you trouble parsing basic concepts? the 2.x branch is being used like Symbian was/is used, for feature phones and feature pads, okay? Now the average dev writing for Android isn't likely to be coding his apps THAT weak, so the odds are that even if he targeted the 2.x branch the apps simply wouldn't run or run so damned slow it would just piss off the user.
Just think about it THIS way, it would be like saying "Because WinXP still has tons of users on Pentium 4s it is THAT configuration you should target" which would just be ignorant, because anybody running a Pentium 4 is most likely not gonna be buying your new software anyway, so why target a demographic that isn't gonna buy your product?
But playing devils advocate here those laws are to protect you from the government NOT private citizens which is what we are talking here. This is why we had to have special communications laws passed for cell phones, because otherwise while the government couldn't do it they could just as easily hire a private corp to do it and be totally legit, just as this private company can pick up anything being broadcast over WiFi since they are not a governmental agent nor working for one.
Don't get me wrong, I still think this sucks balls, but it looks like this is one of those cases where we are gonna need to pass a law that covers private citizens accessing these signals because the current laws simply don't fit the situation.
This is what bugs me about this ruling, sure we geeks know that if we aren't encrypted we are wide open, but how many people hooking their laptop up at the Mickey D's while grabbing their Egg McMuffin are gonna know this? And I still don't get why you aren't allowed to grab cell phones that are unencrypted but are allowed to grab laptops..what's the diff?
Finally let us hope that no matter how crappy this ruling is the plaintiff loses in this case, its another damned patent troll looking to enact tollbooths to every place that offers free WiFi. If this bunch manages to pull it off you'll probably have to whip out your CC just to use that WiFi at the Mickey D's just to cover the patent troll, wonderful. Nothing I hate more on this planet than a God damned patent troll, a leech on the ass of society.
The sad part is the Chinese think they are gonna get through this and modernize, same as we in the USA did, instead they are gonna get assraped by the multinationals...same as we did.
China, after sucking carcinogens and drinking polluted water, is gonna see the same thing done to them that was done to us. Look next time you are in any of the cheap stores like Fred's and Family dollar how much of the low tech stuff is now "Made In Malaysia". This is significant because that is EXACTLY how the corps fucked us, first by moving the low tech shit like garbage pails and cheapo toys and then moving up to the high tech. "The Chinese worker wants clean living conditions?" Fuck that says the megacorps, we can hire slaves in Malaysia for mere pennies of what we are paying the Chinese!
So while the Chinese have been treated like shit in the hopes of an American style middle class what they will actually get is a poisoned landscape filled with empty factories, no different than all the superfund sites we have now, while the megacorps keep chasing the cheapest labor and nastiest environmental rules they can get away with. All we in the west are doing now is exporting misery, spreading it like cancer across the planet. fucking disgusting, that's what it is.
That isn't what I don't get, sure doing ANY heavy lifting on a battery would be dumb, my Brazos plays L4D, GTA:VC, and even Crysis just fine but I sure wouldn't do it on a battery.
No what I don't get is why you would want a chip THAT overpowered in a laptop? To me dropping a chip THAT badass into a laptop form factor is like dropping a V16 into a Pinto, even if you can get it to run you're gonna have a car that is so hot your oil is practically boiling and the radiator might explode.
To me what makes more sense in the thing laptop FF is somewhere in the neighborhood of an i3 or those llano X4s. With those you have a system that can do pretty much any job you'd want to do while on a battery without the system feeling like its gonna melt any second and the poor little fan just spinning like mad trying to cool the heifer.
So THAT is what I don't get, not the battery part. Now I DO have some customers that buy a laptop and use it in the desktop role because they can't afford 2 systems, but those folks ain't buying i7s either. for those folks I usually get them a Liano X4 which seems to be the sweet spot price/performance wise and more importantly they don't roast your nuts when you actually use the thing on the road. I just can't see why anybody would want an uberchip like an i7 in a form factor that is gonna hamstring the shit out of it because of cooling issues.
Dude you should look at a 50s medical book sometime, my mom started out as a nurse in the early 60s so she has a few and they are fucking scary man! They were giving them such high doses you had to even treat their piss as radioactive waste and when they died they had to be buried in lead lined coffins!
And now look at us, we are talking about a plastic that mimics estrogen in the human body being found in newborn fricking babies! You can't tell me that pumping tons of fake estrogen into baby boys and girls from the womb up is good for them, anymore than getting super massive doses of radiation (or even worse radium water, look it up) was good for those poor souls in the 50s.
If these devs are coding for obsolete systems that is their own damned fault, since if you'll look at any eTailer like Amazon or Tigerdirect the ones being sold with 2.x are the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that frankly won't run anything heavier thanks to low end CPUs and pathetic amounts of RAM!
If the devs are really giving a shit about 2.x they may as well go write for Symbian feature phones, because THAT is who all these CCC pads and phones are marketed towards. I have no doubt I'll be picking one of those up for my dad, he just wants to try out the pad form factor and see how it fits him before getting a Transformer. Seeing as how the transformer is $500 with keyboard dock it'd be stupid to shell that out if it turns out he can't get used to the touch way of doing things so picking up some $89-$99 CCC makes sense, then if he likes the FF he can get the Transformer and hand the CCC to his GF who does nothing but FB all day anyway.
So I don't see what the problem is, most devs I'm sure are writing apps that won't run on the low end ARM chips the CCC units running 2.x have anyway, so targeting that version would just be retarded. IIRC the first dual core units all ran 3.2, so I'd target that as a baseline and if they are running something so junky that it can't even run 3.2 then they really should get something that isn't CCC.
You make jokes but I'm afraid that all the polls are forgetting one little thing that will most likely saying "President Romney"...shudder, next year and that is.....The Halo 4 effect.
For those that don't know Obama LOST most demographics in 08, it was the youth vote that put him over the top in many swing states. Well now after 4 years of watching him flip flop and kiss Wall Street ass the group that has lost the most faith in him and in voting in general? the youth voters. And guess what is released on the same day as the election? Halo 4.
Now if you are a young voter, faced with a corporate raider or a flip flopper that didn't do shit compared to what he said he was gonna do, and you're choice is standing in line for those two bozos or halo 4, which are YOU gonna pick? I know while I'm not getting halo 4 I'm not gonna bother this year, they have my state going to Romney by a large percentage anyway and frankly after all his bullshitting I don't think Obama is worth wasting my time over either.
So while i think Romney will be a shitty POTUS, the man was so spoiled he complained about "his ugly car in college" while not bothering to mention it was a fresh out the factory luxury car, and Ryan is an Ayn Rand "Fuck everybody but teh rich!" drone, I seriously doubt after 4 years of ass kissing and flip flopping Obama can get out enough young voters to overcome the Halo 4 effect.
And if he loses? Frankly he deserves it, if he would have stood his ground he would have had the people behind him, instead he waffled and flip flopped and outright lied his ass off when it came to insiders and Wall street favor peddling that if he flames out against someone so hated even his own damned party spent months trying an "Anybody but Mittens!" strategy then the ONLY one he'll have to blame stares him in the mirror each morning. Personally I haven't seen a POTUS piss away the good will he had gained this badly since Jimmy Carter.
But isn't that the problem of Sony in a nutshell, great hardware with fuck all for games, which is why they don't sell? well that and them acting like its 1996 with funky cards instead of using SDHC of course.
Personally I think Sony has burned too many bridges, fucked over too many people, for them to pull out of the nosedive unless they come out with a Halo style "ZOMFG you HAVE to play this!" supermega game. As it is now they simply release God Of War 326, Resistance 29, and then are shocked when nobody buys.
My youngest bought a PSP, it sits in the closet, why? After he had beat the handful of games that were good he really didn't have anything he wanted to play on it and he doesn't feel like fucking with emulators because he's not big into nostalgia. If Sony doesn't come out with a real blockbuster the Vita will end up another PSP Go, not to mention they are mistreating their customers bad enough you have Internet pundits that love the system saying Sony is begging for piracy on the Vita simply because compared to the iPad "click and get game" they make buying from them a PITA.
That is something I have been wondering for awhile now...how long until we hit the bandwidth wall? I mean we are already seeing with the APUs that you have to get the absolute fastest memory the board can possibly take and even then the GPUs are hamstringed by bandwidth, I saw that first hand when I got a good 30% boost in my Brazos netbook simply by ripping out the 1066 for some OCed 1333, and the more cores you add the more those cores are gonna have to be fighting for ever tighter bandwidth pipes.
But what you are seeing on your i7 is exactly why i chose Brazos. I sat down and figured up what jobs I HAD to be able to do mobile and what i could save for at home and found by leaving the heavy loads at home I can get 7+ hours of battery life, more if I wanted to put up with an extra pound and get a 9 cell, and just leave the heavy lifting for the X6 where I have a giant heat pipe CPU cooler that keeps it icy cold. I never understood trying to fit uberchips in a laptop, I mean how many times do you HAVE to transcode a 1080p video on the road?
I agree though that mobile has a way to go, what I think we are gonna end up doing is having more specialized chips for specific jobs. Since I haven't kept up with Intel naming conventions I'll use AMD numbers as examples, like Brazos II for those that need long life above all, Liano for your average user that wants a big screen and to play WoW, and your Piledriver style uber hot chips for those that want to use a laptop as a desktop replacement. Why you would want to do that I have no idea, but some people do for some reason.
But at the end of the day I have customers on 5 and 6 year old chips that are happy as clams, simply because software hasn't kept up anywhere close to the hardware I have customers running Solidworks and Photoshop and Quickbooks on Phenom I X3s and X4s and the machine twiddle their thumbs most of the time because there just isn't enough work to slam all those cores. As we get into 8 and 12 core units that situation is just gonna get more obvious, which is why I say PCs are rapidly becoming like washers and dryers in that nobody replaces until the previous unit dies. I mean why should they? Win 7 is supported for another 8 years, all their software loads super fast with an SSD, they have 4Gb+ of RAM, they simply have more resources than the software can use.
Personally I'm all for it, I like being able to play and game and transcode videos at the same time on my 3 year old X6 without lag, sure beats having to build a new unit every year like I did during the MHz wars.
And whose fault was that? Toyota and Nissan were making their light trucks slick as hell, roll bars and mags, kicking stereos and all the extras, while Ford would change out a little trim, usually without even bothering to update the interior...yawn. Mechanically they are great trucks but about as exciting as your grandma' four door which is why they sold well to the fleets who couldn't give a shit about exciting.
I have to agree on the Toyota though, those 4-Runners and the Nissan King Cabs were both damned nice trucks. I ended up getting nearly 300,000 miles on my king cab before it finally threw a rod and it was still running when i sold it, the guy dropped an engine out of a Sentra and I still see him hauling lumber in it a couple of times a week, just damned good trucks.
Because they can simply move to China, which thanks to MFN will give us the finger and not do shit, thus running out what few companies we have left when they can't compete?
You should watch this cute little video that will show you quickly and easily how it will become a giant scam. Oh and everyone brings up sulfur trading but guess what? It got scammed to the tune of billions by corps getting paid for not putting out sulfur...they weren't gonna put out in the first place! Gotta love being an insider huh?
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Well I gave my boys their own PCs around 8 or 9, somewhere in there, but to be fair I was working at a PC shop at the time and we had shitloads of the Compaq SFF deskpro so it was easy enough to just get the boss to hand me a couple.
I'd say the way to teach kids about computers is the carrot and not the stick. Too many people try to overload them and make it as boring as any other class and just kill the fun. I loaded them up with emulators filled with killer games and when they asked "How can this play NES games without it being a NES? And where is the cartridge?" it was THEN that I started explaining how one chip could be emulated by another, and how they were all computers.
Kids are curious creatures so you expose them and soon enough they'll be the ones asking the questions. Because there was all that "ZOMFG DOOM teaches kids to be killers!" crap in the news I used that as a perfect excuse to give a lesson, so I stuck their pictures on the walls of a DOOM level. Of course they thought that was cool as hell and wanted to know how I did trhat. That led to a nice long lesson on how to edit games, and how games at their heart are nothing but collections of skins and artwork that when put together give the illusion of enemies smart enough to dodge you. It was quite educational and instead of being bored they were rapid firing questions a mile a minute.
So whatever you do make it FUN and let them come to YOU, don't try to force it down their throats. That way they are learning at their own pace and aren't overloaded with ideas they aren't ready for.
Well I think I know what the problem is, and I have a solution...Basic and Premium. You see Android is right now competing in TWO markets instead of one, you have 2.x taking over the feature phone and cheap tablet market and you have 3.x and later competing in the smartphone and premium tablet market.
So frankly what they need is brand differentiation, a way to sell feature phones and premium units without forcing devs to go for the lowest common denominator. this is one area where they can learn from MSFT, let those that care about cheap above all have the Android Basic while those that want the full experience can buy premium units. As a bonus they could divide up their marketing data between those two so that devs could see what kind of apps sell to which kinds of users and could better target their apps to the correct demographic.
But while I think your backport idea is nice i just have to wonder how well it would work with something like that $135 Android phone i linked to. Backporting the APIs really won't help if it makes any apps that use them run like Crysis on a Pentium 3, and since the 2.x market is obviously the razor thin low end market I think the better way to go would be to split it off, just as you get Windows basic with the low end desktops and netbooks and premium for the better equipped stuff. this would also let the customer know at a glance which ones will be updated and which won't so if they want updates? Choose premium devices, don't? Then buy a Basic device and be happy with what it comes with or the Basic market where the apps are designed around low end chips.
All in all I think this would be the most logical solution, would give Google some control, and wouldn't be dependent on the ODMs to keep up if they are gonna be targeting the low end market anyway. Because lets face it trying to run the modern APIs on one of those $79 tablets would just be painful , better to let them stick with 2.x and when the higher end chips drop they can always make 3.x the next Basic.
Well if its backlit there goes that idea, i'll have to buy her the previous model...which I'm sure I can find on sale somewhere, so it'll all even out in the wash. I'm shocked that the modders haven't already hacked the things though with the prices so low it seems like a perfect target for some cyanogenmod kinda goodness.
In the end all the thing is gonna do is read books, that's it, no surfing, no chat, all mom would ever use one for is to buy and read her cheesy horror books so hopefully the previous one ought to cut the mustard for that job.
Riiight, should I address everyone as nigger fuckwit instead? Its called being polite dumbass, which sadly in this day and age qualifies as a superpower.
And thanks for showing you know exactly jack and shit,because I have NEVER, repeat NEVER, gotten an ad from Amazon emails that wasn't based on things I had bought or searched for so even when I didn't buy they at least interested me enough to look.
So keep right on running your adblock, flashblock and cockblock and then be SHOCKED, shocked i tell you! When they give you ads for tampons and adult diapers. The rest of us? Like saving money on our shopping. hell I haven't paid retail for shit in over 3 years now, why should I when I can just wait for a heads up when its on sale?
Why do you go to a doctor? why don't you go to med school and DIY dumbass? Because THAT is how fricking stupid that argument is, like I should have to go spend 4 years to get a comp-sci degree or pay out the ass, which BTW we are talking millions of dollars, just to get the devs to show even a tiny amount of common sense. BTW that is excuse #7 on the list so if you are gonna trot out the classic please go to TM repo and just use the list, thanks.
Oooor...I can do like the rest of the planet, spend a whole $40 for Windows or buy a new Mac and have a hassle free computer...see the problem friend? if you want your OS to remain at 1.05% which for a product being given away gratis against two products that cost actual money is just pathetic, then please, by all means, be as fiddly and big a PITA as you wanna be. But don't come whining and bitching about how 'Ohhh, they won't give us the code! Waah, they won't support us! Boo, its a conspiracy to keep real software off of Linux!" because the rest of us will just laugh and walk away.
In the end you have a PRODUCT, there is a MARKET and in that market you have COMPETITION, if you want to be a hobbyist OS? Then please STFU and be one already! But quit bitching that nobody will take your fiddly OS if you refuse to give the customer what they want because frankly it makes you and the rest of the community look batshit.
Just to make it perfectly clear i'll bold this so you can't miss it The world won't do things YOUR way, you have to do things THEIR way and its as simple as that. The world doesn't give a rat's ass about how bleeding edge your damned kernel is, nor do they give a wet fart about "the power of CLI" which just FYI a primitive GUI and NOT the force, mmmkay?
BTW what do Best Buy, MSI, Asus, walmart, and me have in common? We are ALL retailers who bought into your bullshit only to find a broken OS and now won't allow it into our stores, so its not like I'm alone, in fact I'm in good company I'd say.
But as another poster said you're missing the forest for the wood. the question is WHY aren't they updating? The answer is simple, these units are CCC which means the thinnest of razor thin margins, which makes it simply not financially feasible to update most of these things, if there are even drivers for the older/shittier chips these units use.
Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about which is VERY popular here BTW. We are talking about a $135 Android smartphone, runs 2.3, and service is $50 a month for unlimited everything. You see these things all over the place here, there is no contract, the web surfing is good, it has a nice selection of built in apps. No do you REALLY think they are making enough profit on a $135 no contract phone to make paying devs to update it worth the expense? Hell I bet the users don't even fricking download or buy apps from the market, instead just using what came with the phone!
This is the little secret nobody wants to admit here, that the reason Android is stomping iPhone is that for every $500 Android phone you have 30 of the $135 models being sold. Sure that means a lot of Android users, but those users are using it as a cheap feature phone NOT as a true smartphone. they aren't downloading or buying apps, they don't care about updates, as long as the stuff that comes with the phone works they are happy little campers.
Don't get me wrong, I've tried a friends unit and it does what you'd want a basic phone to do, surf, email, music, its not a bad phone. But one shouldn't be surprised that phones like that simply aren't getting updated, Android has simply taken the feature phone market Symbian used to have with 2.x, that's all.
Actually put me in charge and old Hairyfeet would fix this shit RIGHT quick,copyrights too, ready? "Use it or lose it". You'd have X amount of time to actually have a product for sale, at a market competitive price and reasonable number of locations (to keep them from making a one off and asking $10 million for it just to say they had a product) or your patents and copyrights would go straight to PD, and no getting it back out either. that would get rid of those buying patents just to troll, buying IP away from devs only to never do anything with it, it would make the world a better place for you and me.
Oh Lord don't say that! Don't even joke that! Do you know how many damned times I've had to recover fricking passwords? I even once had to make a rush service call to another city 40 miles away because the Sally Secretary had changed the password on the mission critical billing system and then went off to lunch and promptly forgot it!
Since this was like the fourth time I'd been called out for this particular Sally secretary I asked the owner "If she keeps costing you service calls and missed hours, why don't you fire her?" and he got this wistful look on his face and said "Oh God I'd love to, but my wife and son would kill me, seeing as how she's my daughter in law and all"...ouch.
A good rule of thumb for a killer password that is uncrackable and you can't lose? Just use the serial of something you'll always own. Hell I've had customers that simply used the serial number off the keyboard or the tower so if they forgot all they had to do was lean over and look. I prefer using the serial numbers off my basses myself, i never sell my instruments and that gives you a huge string of letters/numbers/symbols, just perfect and if I ever forget just crack open the case and there it is.
Don't these things have an off switch? never owned one so I don't know, but as far as "killing your battery" from the pics I've seen we are talking static pictures, not some "punch the monkey to win an iPod!" flash mess. You could probably have a week's worth of them loaded in 5Mb of RAM and its not like you're gonna need any real CPU power to simply have a slideshow.
I am curious if anybody knows if these things can actually be turned off though, as I'm seriously thinking of getting one for my mom for XMas but she likes to read a little in bed before calling it a day so she'd need to kill it before she goes to sleep.
Tell me friend, are the ads targeted to you, like the ones in the Amazon emails? if so then I'd have NO problem with them, those ads have saved me probably a good grand in the past 2 years on things I was looking to buy anyway!
If ads are done right they can be really nice, its when the give you ads for crap you'd never buy in a million years that they suck. For example I recently bought a 32gb flash from Amazon for $16 with free shipping. I had been looking at flash drives so i got an email saying "Select flash drives 45% off today" and looked and they had the size i wanted for $8 less so I bought. Now why would an ad like that, that shows you only things you want to buy, bother anybody? That's why I signed up for the Tigerdirect and NewEgg emails, that way i don't buy anything list price anymore.
So i'm really curious as to what kind of ads they show. if they show only stuff that is connected to what you've previously bought I'll be picking up one of these for my mom for Xmas, she already loves the heads up she gets from Amazon when her favorite authors put out new books so targeted ads would be just fine for her, but if it shows you crap you'll never buy, like BBQ sets and baby diapers, then I can see saying screw it and buying the previous ad free version.
Well while they can regulate their own markets the problem is their money comes from exports and just as an American firm would be hard pressed to build devices cheap as Chinese, again because of slaves, lack of regulations, and the ability to just dump toxins out the back door, I have a feeling that the Chinese are likewise gonna find it tough to compete against someone in Malaysia that is getting paid 50c a day and whose rivers catch on fire.
That is the problem with countries like USA and China in the age of the multinationals, they can just keep hoping from one starving country to the next and keep polluting and thus kill any chance of competition. This is why the whole "educate the workforce!" bit turned out to be horseshit, as the multinationals found they could do the same thing with education they did with manufacturing in that they can hire an Indian or Chinese that paid peanuts for their degree and thus undercut you again.
Finally don't forget for every person in your workforce who can get a degree you are gonna have 7 that aren't smart enough, what do you do with these people now that you can hire a dozen in Malaysia for the price of a Big Mac? The Chinese are gonna find out, just as we did, that for every Chinese they can educate to an engineering level degree they are gonna have 30 that are only qualified to work in factories and other repetitive jobs, jobs that will be done in Malaysia because they will work for a bowl of rice and won't complain if the air looks like London of the 1800s.
Well you could solve that by saying "contains at least X amount" which next time you are in a store look at the mixed nuts as they already list "contains less than x amount of peanuts" on the label.
And I agree completely this is one of those areas where competition and the market would take care of it, those with better quality ingredients would brag while those that didn't would be looked upon as low quality, and again without having to list exactly what is in everything in what amounts.
Because the only people I've ever met that have actually cared about those labels are people who have allergies and all they are looking for is "does it have ANY of the stuff I'm allergic to?" so letting them protect their recipes by not listing amounts, just ingredients, would serve that function while letting people eat safely. And it is a pretty interesting discussion, something that most people never think about but is on every single thing they buy at the store.
But you just made my point for me friend, the people that are buying these cheap smartphones are happy with what they have on them and therefor shouldn't be the ones you are trying to market your apps to in the first place!
I have several friends on the Walmart "all you can use for $50, no contract" plans because they were tired of being screwed on minutes or SMS with their contracts and they are quite happy with what the phones came with. They are happy with the browser, the apps, the little time wasting games, i don't think that they have downloaded a single app from the appstore, not one. To them its a feature phone that does the web, just that simple.
To use a /. car analogy, it would be like saying "Toyota Camry is the #1 car so you should target your $6k a set rims at the Camry" which if the people that actually own a Camry don't buy $6k rims it really doesn't matter how many of them there are, does it?
The people running 2.x frankly don't give a shit about apps and appstores, they are happy with what is on the phone. I'd love to see the number of app sales from the Google appstore and see how many of them in the last year are from 2.x users because i bet no matter how many of them their are the amount of actual sales to those users is probably so low as to not matter, so why should devs target them?
Ooookay, maybe your drinking is giving you trouble parsing basic concepts? the 2.x branch is being used like Symbian was/is used, for feature phones and feature pads, okay? Now the average dev writing for Android isn't likely to be coding his apps THAT weak, so the odds are that even if he targeted the 2.x branch the apps simply wouldn't run or run so damned slow it would just piss off the user.
Just think about it THIS way, it would be like saying "Because WinXP still has tons of users on Pentium 4s it is THAT configuration you should target" which would just be ignorant, because anybody running a Pentium 4 is most likely not gonna be buying your new software anyway, so why target a demographic that isn't gonna buy your product?
But playing devils advocate here those laws are to protect you from the government NOT private citizens which is what we are talking here. This is why we had to have special communications laws passed for cell phones, because otherwise while the government couldn't do it they could just as easily hire a private corp to do it and be totally legit, just as this private company can pick up anything being broadcast over WiFi since they are not a governmental agent nor working for one.
Don't get me wrong, I still think this sucks balls, but it looks like this is one of those cases where we are gonna need to pass a law that covers private citizens accessing these signals because the current laws simply don't fit the situation.
This is what bugs me about this ruling, sure we geeks know that if we aren't encrypted we are wide open, but how many people hooking their laptop up at the Mickey D's while grabbing their Egg McMuffin are gonna know this? And I still don't get why you aren't allowed to grab cell phones that are unencrypted but are allowed to grab laptops..what's the diff?
Finally let us hope that no matter how crappy this ruling is the plaintiff loses in this case, its another damned patent troll looking to enact tollbooths to every place that offers free WiFi. If this bunch manages to pull it off you'll probably have to whip out your CC just to use that WiFi at the Mickey D's just to cover the patent troll, wonderful. Nothing I hate more on this planet than a God damned patent troll, a leech on the ass of society.
The sad part is the Chinese think they are gonna get through this and modernize, same as we in the USA did, instead they are gonna get assraped by the multinationals...same as we did.
China, after sucking carcinogens and drinking polluted water, is gonna see the same thing done to them that was done to us. Look next time you are in any of the cheap stores like Fred's and Family dollar how much of the low tech stuff is now "Made In Malaysia". This is significant because that is EXACTLY how the corps fucked us, first by moving the low tech shit like garbage pails and cheapo toys and then moving up to the high tech. "The Chinese worker wants clean living conditions?" Fuck that says the megacorps, we can hire slaves in Malaysia for mere pennies of what we are paying the Chinese!
So while the Chinese have been treated like shit in the hopes of an American style middle class what they will actually get is a poisoned landscape filled with empty factories, no different than all the superfund sites we have now, while the megacorps keep chasing the cheapest labor and nastiest environmental rules they can get away with. All we in the west are doing now is exporting misery, spreading it like cancer across the planet. fucking disgusting, that's what it is.
That isn't what I don't get, sure doing ANY heavy lifting on a battery would be dumb, my Brazos plays L4D, GTA:VC, and even Crysis just fine but I sure wouldn't do it on a battery.
No what I don't get is why you would want a chip THAT overpowered in a laptop? To me dropping a chip THAT badass into a laptop form factor is like dropping a V16 into a Pinto, even if you can get it to run you're gonna have a car that is so hot your oil is practically boiling and the radiator might explode.
To me what makes more sense in the thing laptop FF is somewhere in the neighborhood of an i3 or those llano X4s. With those you have a system that can do pretty much any job you'd want to do while on a battery without the system feeling like its gonna melt any second and the poor little fan just spinning like mad trying to cool the heifer.
So THAT is what I don't get, not the battery part. Now I DO have some customers that buy a laptop and use it in the desktop role because they can't afford 2 systems, but those folks ain't buying i7s either. for those folks I usually get them a Liano X4 which seems to be the sweet spot price/performance wise and more importantly they don't roast your nuts when you actually use the thing on the road. I just can't see why anybody would want an uberchip like an i7 in a form factor that is gonna hamstring the shit out of it because of cooling issues.
Dude you should look at a 50s medical book sometime, my mom started out as a nurse in the early 60s so she has a few and they are fucking scary man! They were giving them such high doses you had to even treat their piss as radioactive waste and when they died they had to be buried in lead lined coffins!
And now look at us, we are talking about a plastic that mimics estrogen in the human body being found in newborn fricking babies! You can't tell me that pumping tons of fake estrogen into baby boys and girls from the womb up is good for them, anymore than getting super massive doses of radiation (or even worse radium water, look it up) was good for those poor souls in the 50s.
If these devs are coding for obsolete systems that is their own damned fault, since if you'll look at any eTailer like Amazon or Tigerdirect the ones being sold with 2.x are the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that frankly won't run anything heavier thanks to low end CPUs and pathetic amounts of RAM!
If the devs are really giving a shit about 2.x they may as well go write for Symbian feature phones, because THAT is who all these CCC pads and phones are marketed towards. I have no doubt I'll be picking one of those up for my dad, he just wants to try out the pad form factor and see how it fits him before getting a Transformer. Seeing as how the transformer is $500 with keyboard dock it'd be stupid to shell that out if it turns out he can't get used to the touch way of doing things so picking up some $89-$99 CCC makes sense, then if he likes the FF he can get the Transformer and hand the CCC to his GF who does nothing but FB all day anyway.
So I don't see what the problem is, most devs I'm sure are writing apps that won't run on the low end ARM chips the CCC units running 2.x have anyway, so targeting that version would just be retarded. IIRC the first dual core units all ran 3.2, so I'd target that as a baseline and if they are running something so junky that it can't even run 3.2 then they really should get something that isn't CCC.
You make jokes but I'm afraid that all the polls are forgetting one little thing that will most likely saying "President Romney"...shudder, next year and that is.....The Halo 4 effect.
For those that don't know Obama LOST most demographics in 08, it was the youth vote that put him over the top in many swing states. Well now after 4 years of watching him flip flop and kiss Wall Street ass the group that has lost the most faith in him and in voting in general? the youth voters. And guess what is released on the same day as the election? Halo 4.
Now if you are a young voter, faced with a corporate raider or a flip flopper that didn't do shit compared to what he said he was gonna do, and you're choice is standing in line for those two bozos or halo 4, which are YOU gonna pick? I know while I'm not getting halo 4 I'm not gonna bother this year, they have my state going to Romney by a large percentage anyway and frankly after all his bullshitting I don't think Obama is worth wasting my time over either.
So while i think Romney will be a shitty POTUS, the man was so spoiled he complained about "his ugly car in college" while not bothering to mention it was a fresh out the factory luxury car, and Ryan is an Ayn Rand "Fuck everybody but teh rich!" drone, I seriously doubt after 4 years of ass kissing and flip flopping Obama can get out enough young voters to overcome the Halo 4 effect.
And if he loses? Frankly he deserves it, if he would have stood his ground he would have had the people behind him, instead he waffled and flip flopped and outright lied his ass off when it came to insiders and Wall street favor peddling that if he flames out against someone so hated even his own damned party spent months trying an "Anybody but Mittens!" strategy then the ONLY one he'll have to blame stares him in the mirror each morning. Personally I haven't seen a POTUS piss away the good will he had gained this badly since Jimmy Carter.
But isn't that the problem of Sony in a nutshell, great hardware with fuck all for games, which is why they don't sell? well that and them acting like its 1996 with funky cards instead of using SDHC of course.
Personally I think Sony has burned too many bridges, fucked over too many people, for them to pull out of the nosedive unless they come out with a Halo style "ZOMFG you HAVE to play this!" supermega game. As it is now they simply release God Of War 326, Resistance 29, and then are shocked when nobody buys.
My youngest bought a PSP, it sits in the closet, why? After he had beat the handful of games that were good he really didn't have anything he wanted to play on it and he doesn't feel like fucking with emulators because he's not big into nostalgia. If Sony doesn't come out with a real blockbuster the Vita will end up another PSP Go, not to mention they are mistreating their customers bad enough you have Internet pundits that love the system saying Sony is begging for piracy on the Vita simply because compared to the iPad "click and get game" they make buying from them a PITA.
That is something I have been wondering for awhile now...how long until we hit the bandwidth wall? I mean we are already seeing with the APUs that you have to get the absolute fastest memory the board can possibly take and even then the GPUs are hamstringed by bandwidth, I saw that first hand when I got a good 30% boost in my Brazos netbook simply by ripping out the 1066 for some OCed 1333, and the more cores you add the more those cores are gonna have to be fighting for ever tighter bandwidth pipes.
But what you are seeing on your i7 is exactly why i chose Brazos. I sat down and figured up what jobs I HAD to be able to do mobile and what i could save for at home and found by leaving the heavy loads at home I can get 7+ hours of battery life, more if I wanted to put up with an extra pound and get a 9 cell, and just leave the heavy lifting for the X6 where I have a giant heat pipe CPU cooler that keeps it icy cold. I never understood trying to fit uberchips in a laptop, I mean how many times do you HAVE to transcode a 1080p video on the road?
I agree though that mobile has a way to go, what I think we are gonna end up doing is having more specialized chips for specific jobs. Since I haven't kept up with Intel naming conventions I'll use AMD numbers as examples, like Brazos II for those that need long life above all, Liano for your average user that wants a big screen and to play WoW, and your Piledriver style uber hot chips for those that want to use a laptop as a desktop replacement. Why you would want to do that I have no idea, but some people do for some reason.
But at the end of the day I have customers on 5 and 6 year old chips that are happy as clams, simply because software hasn't kept up anywhere close to the hardware I have customers running Solidworks and Photoshop and Quickbooks on Phenom I X3s and X4s and the machine twiddle their thumbs most of the time because there just isn't enough work to slam all those cores. As we get into 8 and 12 core units that situation is just gonna get more obvious, which is why I say PCs are rapidly becoming like washers and dryers in that nobody replaces until the previous unit dies. I mean why should they? Win 7 is supported for another 8 years, all their software loads super fast with an SSD, they have 4Gb+ of RAM, they simply have more resources than the software can use.
Personally I'm all for it, I like being able to play and game and transcode videos at the same time on my 3 year old X6 without lag, sure beats having to build a new unit every year like I did during the MHz wars.
And whose fault was that? Toyota and Nissan were making their light trucks slick as hell, roll bars and mags, kicking stereos and all the extras, while Ford would change out a little trim, usually without even bothering to update the interior...yawn. Mechanically they are great trucks but about as exciting as your grandma' four door which is why they sold well to the fleets who couldn't give a shit about exciting.
I have to agree on the Toyota though, those 4-Runners and the Nissan King Cabs were both damned nice trucks. I ended up getting nearly 300,000 miles on my king cab before it finally threw a rod and it was still running when i sold it, the guy dropped an engine out of a Sentra and I still see him hauling lumber in it a couple of times a week, just damned good trucks.
Because they can simply move to China, which thanks to MFN will give us the finger and not do shit, thus running out what few companies we have left when they can't compete?
You should watch this cute little video that will show you quickly and easily how it will become a giant scam. Oh and everyone brings up sulfur trading but guess what? It got scammed to the tune of billions by corps getting paid for not putting out sulfur...they weren't gonna put out in the first place! Gotta love being an insider huh?