but for a desktop, I gotta know WHAT the hell they're smoking in Redmond...
A custom blend of imported "your app store moneyz gives them to us" with the domestically produced "if they're forced to use it at work they'll use it at home" and "What competition?"
It didn't make Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Google made Android huge in the mobile space. The kernel has simply been utilized, with little flowing upstream into it from Android and frequent GPL violations by Chinese ODMs.
It is, otherwise, incompatible with what's commonly referred to as "Linux."
-- Linux Torvalds commenting on his blog about his at the time newly acquired Nexus One
I will politely defer to his opinion over what anyone else thinks in this matter.
Full sentence for context:
At the same time I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, and I've had a number of them over the years (in addition to the G1, I had one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones) etc.
That's as close to an explicit declaration by Torvalds on Android being Linux as I can find. If you have something where he says otherwise in a more direct way I'd be happy to see it. Otherwise, if the Nexus One with Froyo Android on it is said to "run Linux" by the creator of Linux then that's case closed.
Even if Google has no interest in using patents offensively it would be foolish not to have something for the M.A.D. game when the next round of the patent wars kicks off. Mobile and the cloud are two huge growth areas in computing right now and mobile is consumed in a big way in lawsuits. Whither the cloud?
If Linux ever comes to dominate the desktop it'll be in some form that just comes out of nowhere the way Android did* and made Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Windows would be a lot harder to displace than the iPhone though.
*Yes to people on here Android was old hat by the time it actually appeared but to most consumers it just appeared out of nowhere one day in 2008.
Is a legitimate subjective evaluation. Flippancy like "it's dumb" gets answered in kind: "How them grapes taste?"
It's a fallacy to assume that I'm a prey of US mobile operators. I'm not tied to a contract, I can change my unsubsidised phone any day. If you buy into a two-year contract, you'd better make sure it has all you really need now, not expect it to gain utility because of somebody's unstated plans or the general feeling of "market momentum".
Slashdot is a US centric site so I was talking about the typical experience in the US assuming that would be implicitly clear (you know this being a US site and all and you not explicitly mentioning you were coming at the conversation from a non-US pov). Of all the things to consume every single moment until the heat death of the Universe, having to explain every little thing to preempt pedantry on Slashdot is pretty low on the list. Just imagine a [In the US] in front of every statement. There's also the fact that a significant fraction of European smartphone owners are on a contract. There are even contracts in Canada that go for 3 years which would be an even worse place to be with a recently acquired Windows Phone 7 device.
I will continue having such little things as free offline navigation in any part of the world I could expect to get to, public transport route finding, maps with Groupon deals, and Sports Tracker, all provided by Nokia. I actually feel well-stocked on the applications that I can make use of. Now personally, I would jump to WP8 if the new features such as the wallet are made useful enough in my country, but I don't see much loss in staying with WP7, at least for now.
You still haven't explained how that has anything to do with third party support drying up. You're not being specific so I have to infer from your paragraph that you don't use (many?) third party apps but that is atypical and most consumers would be effected.
Um, when many of those hundreds of millions of Gingerbread users bought their phone, it was the latest spec or very comparable. OEMs didn't really move to ICS en masse until very recently.
How is this different from people buying WP7 devices even though WP8 devices are already announced?
I've already told you why if wp8 takes off wp7 dev support will likely suffer. The dynamics of the Android market are different from windows phone and as a result Gingerbread phones bought today will still have solid dev support for the likely length of any contract.
Are you saying that top-priced Android phones sell well not because of superior user experience, but because of specs overdriven to impress the people with stupid money to burn?
I was indulging your argument a little bit. My mistake. Between my Nexus S and my Galaxy Nexus both running identical software but the latter handset with the higher specs is the superior experience. When you're trying to generalize an entire market you have to couch your terms in words like "typical" and you have to discount edge cases. The "typical" higher specced phone is going to give a superior user experience than a lower specced phone. Why is it superior? Because people think it is and that's what matters to the market.
There are a few more dimensions: "drains battery faster"
The phone with the highest battery life on the market runs Android and almost all phones last a day of typical usage anyway. People have to sleep and when they do they plug their phones in.
and "crashes often" vs "no problems at all".
I've never had an Android phone "crash" and do a spontaneous reboot. Also in the only real study I could find, the evidence showd iPhone third party apps crash more often than Android apps. And I've had an HD7, multiple Android devices and currently own an iPad. The
Um, your reading between the lines of the GP is a bit too rosy. I don't remember Nokia ever creating anything exceptional just many things that were damn good for their day
The OP said "decades of building great phones which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware" Obviously "building great phones" in that sentence is what had to be scaled back and not the actual hardware itself and the only way for the entire phrase to be logically consistent is if OP was referring to the state of being a great phone maker rather than any specific phone. Taking his statement at face value, my interpretation is more likely as it is consistent with both facts and how he worded it (even with the espoused admiration for Nokia hardware). Your interpretation isn't any more likely based on his verbiage however it does imply the logical inconsistency which has a stronger burden of proof taking the posters history in account. Maybe Locutus will clue both of us in.
Right, because high specs is the only thing that sells,
There are of course many reasons why Windows Phone doesn't sell other than just the dated specs but the fact is that many people do respond to things like "dual core" and "HD screen" and "32 GB" (whoa, what? The L900 is limited to 16). You are confusing the tone of my post with the content. I am not judging windows phone because it has lower specs, I'm saying many consumers do and that's one of the reasons they don't buy it.
who needs software that doesn't make you furious while using it?
I've never used an electronic device in my entire life that didn't infuriate me from time to time including Windows Phone. When I had my HD7 it used to drive me nuts when reading a webite in landscape mode then having to go to portrait to access the url bar. Sometimes you'd flip it back to landscape and the text would be massively zoomed in with no way to fix it other than a slow page reload. As a person that browses a lot on his phone that was a deal killer right there and part of the reason I got rid of it.
stupid money spent on unnecessary things
So what's stupid? HD screens? I have to look at that screen everyday for the duration of my ownership of the phone and I want it to be a good one. And if you amortized the additional cost of the screen over the life of the contract it would be pennies a day. Of all the specs that you can't see that probably don't really matter that much, you bring up the one thing that makes a clear difference.
It may never cross your mind, but there are people buying a phone that has everything to fulfill their current needs, that's it.
But that's a fallacy and a perfect example of your mind playing tricks on you. Human nature leads you to exaggerate the importance of the present over future utility. A phone can "fulfill your current needs" and still be a bad deal because you are stuck with the phone until your contract is up. That's why people don't save and why they don't successfully diet. It's also why they might buy phones that are likely to lose developer support before their halfway through their contract.
Which will mean little to Nokia who will be laughing all the way to the bank counting money from new WP8 sales? Anyway, what various WP software vendors will do is still hypothetical. Nokia already has a sizable set of applications written for WP7, I guess not every one of them will need to lose backwards compatibility to the point that it cannot be maintained even as a trimmed down variant.
I doubt Nokia will be laughing all the way to the bank anytime soon but at any rate I don't care as that has nothing to do with what I was even talking about. And what do Nokia's apps have to do with wp7 losing dev support if wp8 takes off? You will have wp7 with minimal third party support and, oh yeah, some Nokia apps. yay
That's not really that hard. You could take any Android phone with hdmi out and USB otg, put in a shoebox, run the hdmi cable and controller cable to the usb, turn it on to Shadowgun and call it a console. It's too easy to even be a real test of whether this is real or not. And it's a moot point now anyway. They have their money hopefully we'll get our console.
As such "Hacker Highschool" is doomed to attract everything from raised eyebrows to terminology-holy-wars.
Perfect. Sounds like a gimme for easy publicity. Not only that but one of their main goals is to "reverse this negative stereotype of hacking by encouraging teens to embrace ethical, responsible hacking". So if they are doing good work that fits the original definition of hacking and part of their mission is to change the perception of the word hacking then what better way to do that than to associate good deeds with "Hacker Highschool".
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
You are an idiot. Reparse the sentence. He's saying Nokia essentially stopped dead in its tracks with windows phone. The GP is talking about decades of Nokia building great hardware [that continually push the boundaries of what is possible]. They have been stuck with variations of the same windows phone specced shit since they delivered the first Lumia. And since "there is no plan B", they weren't about to just put Symbian or Meego on some real high spec stuff. Oh no, fuck making money when we Nokia can just collectively lick Ballmers ballsack, right? All the while the rest of the industry has moved forward with HD screens, dual-sim handsets, and with native coding and high performance GPUs the ability to play honest to goodness real 3D games.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out.
What separates a fanboy from a mere platform enthusiast? The enthusiast honestly admits when the platform vision has ran off the rails and the fanboy just makes excuses. Listen, drone, the people buying Windows Phones today that go home on a 2 year contract are getting screwed. First of all, obviously they won't be getting the wp8 upgrade they'll have to make do with the window dressing wp7.8 shit sandwich. Do you think at&t is telling them that? Ha! Secondly, they are getting screwed because when windows phone 8 drops it has a lot of new features that developers have been asking for like native code. Native code on a phone is good for amongst others, 2 main things: 1) some code runs much faster in optimized native form rather than jitted managed code and 2) porting software from one platform to another. The next time you talk to one of your betters, ask to see his Android phone and install an app called Addons Detector. Run it and marvel at how many apps use the NDK for native code. Guess what? Many of those apps will be the ones getting ported to wp8. Practically none will ever see the light of day on wp7. So while your wp8 wielding peers are rocking out on Shadowgun and Deadspace, you will have to console yourself with yet another playthrough of Angry Birds (that is on your market right? Ha ha). And if miracle of miracles wp8 actually takes off and gets a sizable number of users, guess what happens to wp7 dev support? Go bye bye. Windows Phone devs will be too busy chasing the real market and your wp7 might as well be an OpenMoko Freerunner as far as they're concerned as a rounding error of market share isn't worth developing for. If wp8 takes off, prepare for your lumia 900 to be all but abandoned inside of a year (into your multi-year contract). Guess what? You got screwed! And even if wp8 doesn't take off, that only means not only are they screwing you behind your back but they're scewing you directly to your face because MS and Nokia's every intention is for wp8 to succeed so if their vision succeeds, they know your handset will be losing serious dev support.
Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
Oh this trolling again? You think you have an actual point with this? Guess what, bucko? Unlike above where wp7 loses developer support, Gingerbread has over a hundred million users and any Android dev that writes an app using newer api's is prompted to download the compatibility library before the project even gets loaded the first time in Eclipse. See, Google gives a shit about their users of older devices in the most important way. Not window dressing bullshit but actual backwards compatibility. So keep ignoring reality and argue in soundbites
Wouldn't it be interesting to have a computer vision system advanced enough to comb through every digital image it could find anywhere including video stills, the internet, usenet, what have you and be able to recognize discrete objects then put them in a reverse sorted list starting with "1" objects that only showed up once in any photograph ever and then to "2" and so forth. I bet some fascinating discoveries could be made.
I let them know what I thought about the situation and how they could help recover at least a little goodwill. Dropping the requirement for them to respond individually to the ridiculous "complaints" would be a good start.
Linpus was the craptastic Linux MSI used for a little while
Apparently you need a history lesson too. It was Acer that shipped Linpus on the Aspire One. I got mixed up because that's the model I had until I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. MSI shipped with SUSE onboard.
And they didn't quit selling it because MSFT offered them a deal
I didn't say they did. I didn't even imply it. What I said was:
XP was familiar and would run on the little laptops (they weren't really netbooks anymore) and MS recovered the market pretty quickly.
Which is in agreement with this:
Dude, just accept it, you have to give the people what they want and Linux don't.
So I'm 3 sentences in to your post and sentence 1 was you trying to condescend me about something that you can't get wrong in the very next breath. Sentence 2 is you confirming that you don't know what you're talking about. And sentence 3 is you arguing against something I didn't even say. What is the point of having a conversation with you?
Heh. If people are so worried about "good" coders then start some kind of exclusive app store. Lay down the law that only correct code is allowed in here! I'm sure they'll come running by the dozens.
Paying MS a chunk of money for each Android device doesn't decrease the windows mindshare whilst it does support MS for doing basically nothing.
If a consumer buys an Android device in lieu of a Windows device be it phone or tablet then that does dilute Windows' mindshare. Not only that but it is a precedent at least in the tablet space since most people are used to equating computer=Microsoft and tablets while not completely breaking that chain of thought certainly weaken it. Most people aren't rich and if they buy a tablet at all only buy one so if they're buying an Android they are almost certainly not buying another Windows laptop or any hypothetical Microsoft tablet. I am not wild about the patent license thing but it is what it is right now so we have to accept it. The silver lining is that while it seems like a lot of money it is "paltry" compared to what MS and its ecosystem partnerswould have gotten had they sold an entire device instead of just taxing the Android one. When a tablet sells at least a couple of hundred dollars are made on it by the various entities in the chain. The OEM makes money, their suppliers make money, MS makes money, the retailer makes money etc. If that unit shifts with Windows everybody knows about it and it strengthens the collective resolve to promote those products but if Android or Linux shift then the opposite happens and while MS gets their patent fee, they lose the after sale leverage over the consumer and they lose that tiny amount of grip over the supply chain. They would gladly give up that patent fee to sell Windows units even if it meant making nothing in the process because of the overall effect.
MS' greatest power is mindshare with the consumer and their OEM licensing power and they are loath to lose even a little bit of that. It's like back in the netbook days, they turned on a dime to give away XP and that was just to fight pathetic little Linpus Linux on the Eee PC. Right now they are completely flipping their number one flagship product around and pissing a lot of people off in the process just to compete with the iPad. And the iPad sells nowhere near what PCs sell in a month. Yet they are going so far as to force not-Metro on their server product. They don't give a shit about the patent fees on Linux and Android as even hundreds of million a year are a drop in the bucket compared to Office and Windows profits. What they want is to sew FUD and when people get up in arms over it the FUD is working. I hesitate to use a charged word but it is almost a form of terror (no disrespect to real terror victims) and if you play along and get scared, they win. Just pay the fees and get over it because in the long run they still lose.
There are more Android phones out there, so people are more likely to own one.
If you break down smartphone model from a random sampling of the US population people are more likely to have an iPhone as it is the best selling single family of devices. However Android being the best selling OS, you are more likely to find that across the range of devices the people would have.
They are much more likely to be the 'default' choice while picking a phone (free with a contract, etc) so people are less likely to be using them. If you care enough to select and pay the premium for an iPhone, you're more likely to actually use it.
I have a Galaxy Nexus and it in no way replaces either of my tablets. Maybe one of the Galaxy Notes at 5.5 inches but most people aren't interested in carrying something that size in their pockets. I think 7 inches is the minimum to comfortably use for tablet duty and nobody wants a phone that size. You bring up an interesting point though and I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't find the license terms at their website and I don't have a Windows computer to download the installer to. Can a commercial environment just install start8 en masse without restrictions? If not then that isn't any kind of a solution.
but for a desktop, I gotta know WHAT the hell they're smoking in Redmond...
A custom blend of imported "your app store moneyz gives them to us" with the domestically produced "if they're forced to use it at work they'll use it at home" and "What competition?"
It's some pretty good shit so I'm led to believe.
Windows Server 2012, aka Windows 8 sans Metro
Unless you specifically use Server Core mode, Windows 8 comes default with the Metro interface.
And of course I typed Linus' name as "Linux". *facepalm*
It didn't make Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Google made Android huge in the mobile space. The kernel has simply been utilized, with little flowing upstream into it from Android and frequent GPL violations by Chinese ODMs.
It is, otherwise, incompatible with what's commonly referred to as "Linux."
I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux
-- Linux Torvalds commenting on his blog about his at the time newly acquired Nexus One
I will politely defer to his opinion over what anyone else thinks in this matter.
Full sentence for context:
At the same time I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, and I've had a number of them over the years (in addition to the G1, I had one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones) etc.
That's as close to an explicit declaration by Torvalds on Android being Linux as I can find. If you have something where he says otherwise in a more direct way I'd be happy to see it. Otherwise, if the Nexus One with Froyo Android on it is said to "run Linux" by the creator of Linux then that's case closed.
+1 Funny to you!
Even if Google has no interest in using patents offensively it would be foolish not to have something for the M.A.D. game when the next round of the patent wars kicks off. Mobile and the cloud are two huge growth areas in computing right now and mobile is consumed in a big way in lawsuits. Whither the cloud?
If Linux ever comes to dominate the desktop it'll be in some form that just comes out of nowhere the way Android did* and made Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Windows would be a lot harder to displace than the iPhone though.
*Yes to people on here Android was old hat by the time it actually appeared but to most consumers it just appeared out of nowhere one day in 2008.
about as useful as a catflap on a sub.
But I am a catflap on a sub you insensitive clod!
Each to his own I guess but the more I use Unity the more I like it. I even like the dual monitor support everybody else hates.
I can't see it.
Is a legitimate subjective evaluation. Flippancy like "it's dumb" gets answered in kind: "How them grapes taste?"
It's a fallacy to assume that I'm a prey of US mobile operators. I'm not tied to a contract, I can change my unsubsidised phone any day. If you buy into a two-year contract, you'd better make sure it has all you really need now, not expect it to gain utility because of somebody's unstated plans or the general feeling of "market momentum".
Slashdot is a US centric site so I was talking about the typical experience in the US assuming that would be implicitly clear (you know this being a US site and all and you not explicitly mentioning you were coming at the conversation from a non-US pov). Of all the things to consume every single moment until the heat death of the Universe, having to explain every little thing to preempt pedantry on Slashdot is pretty low on the list. Just imagine a [In the US] in front of every statement. There's also the fact that a significant fraction of European smartphone owners are on a contract. There are even contracts in Canada that go for 3 years which would be an even worse place to be with a recently acquired Windows Phone 7 device.
I will continue having such little things as free offline navigation in any part of the world I could expect to get to, public transport route finding, maps with Groupon deals, and Sports Tracker, all provided by Nokia. I actually feel well-stocked on the applications that I can make use of. Now personally, I would jump to WP8 if the new features such as the wallet are made useful enough in my country, but I don't see much loss in staying with WP7, at least for now.
You still haven't explained how that has anything to do with third party support drying up. You're not being specific so I have to infer from your paragraph that you don't use (many?) third party apps but that is atypical and most consumers would be effected.
Um, when many of those hundreds of millions of Gingerbread users bought their phone, it was the latest spec or very comparable. OEMs didn't really move to ICS en masse until very recently.
How is this different from people buying WP7 devices even though WP8 devices are already announced?
I've already told you why if wp8 takes off wp7 dev support will likely suffer. The dynamics of the Android market are different from windows phone and as a result Gingerbread phones bought today will still have solid dev support for the likely length of any contract.
Are you saying that top-priced Android phones sell well not because of superior user experience, but because of specs overdriven to impress the people with stupid money to burn?
I was indulging your argument a little bit. My mistake. Between my Nexus S and my Galaxy Nexus both running identical software but the latter handset with the higher specs is the superior experience. When you're trying to generalize an entire market you have to couch your terms in words like "typical" and you have to discount edge cases. The "typical" higher specced phone is going to give a superior user experience than a lower specced phone. Why is it superior? Because people think it is and that's what matters to the market.
There are a few more dimensions: "drains battery faster"
The phone with the highest battery life on the market runs Android and almost all phones last a day of typical usage anyway. People have to sleep and when they do they plug their phones in.
and "crashes often" vs "no problems at all".
I've never had an Android phone "crash" and do a spontaneous reboot. Also in the only real study I could find, the evidence showd iPhone third party apps crash more often than Android apps. And I've had an HD7, multiple Android devices and currently own an iPad. The
Yep but it'd make a great demo! That Ouya with a Tegra 3 and a controller for 109 really is a dynamite price.
Um, your reading between the lines of the GP is a bit too rosy. I don't remember Nokia ever creating anything exceptional just many things that were damn good for their day
The OP said "decades of building great phones which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware" Obviously "building great phones" in that sentence is what had to be scaled back and not the actual hardware itself and the only way for the entire phrase to be logically consistent is if OP was referring to the state of being a great phone maker rather than any specific phone. Taking his statement at face value, my interpretation is more likely as it is consistent with both facts and how he worded it (even with the espoused admiration for Nokia hardware). Your interpretation isn't any more likely based on his verbiage however it does imply the logical inconsistency which has a stronger burden of proof taking the posters history in account. Maybe Locutus will clue both of us in.
Right, because high specs is the only thing that sells,
There are of course many reasons why Windows Phone doesn't sell other than just the dated specs but the fact is that many people do respond to things like "dual core" and "HD screen" and "32 GB" (whoa, what? The L900 is limited to 16). You are confusing the tone of my post with the content. I am not judging windows phone because it has lower specs, I'm saying many consumers do and that's one of the reasons they don't buy it.
who needs software that doesn't make you furious while using it?
I've never used an electronic device in my entire life that didn't infuriate me from time to time including Windows Phone. When I had my HD7 it used to drive me nuts when reading a webite in landscape mode then having to go to portrait to access the url bar. Sometimes you'd flip it back to landscape and the text would be massively zoomed in with no way to fix it other than a slow page reload. As a person that browses a lot on his phone that was a deal killer right there and part of the reason I got rid of it.
stupid money spent on unnecessary things
So what's stupid? HD screens? I have to look at that screen everyday for the duration of my ownership of the phone and I want it to be a good one. And if you amortized the additional cost of the screen over the life of the contract it would be pennies a day. Of all the specs that you can't see that probably don't really matter that much, you bring up the one thing that makes a clear difference.
It may never cross your mind, but there are people buying a phone that has everything to fulfill their current needs, that's it.
But that's a fallacy and a perfect example of your mind playing tricks on you. Human nature leads you to exaggerate the importance of the present over future utility. A phone can "fulfill your current needs" and still be a bad deal because you are stuck with the phone until your contract is up. That's why people don't save and why they don't successfully diet. It's also why they might buy phones that are likely to lose developer support before their halfway through their contract.
Which will mean little to Nokia who will be laughing all the way to the bank counting money from new WP8 sales? Anyway, what various WP software vendors will do is still hypothetical. Nokia already has a sizable set of applications written for WP7, I guess not every one of them will need to lose backwards compatibility to the point that it cannot be maintained even as a trimmed down variant.
I doubt Nokia will be laughing all the way to the bank anytime soon but at any rate I don't care as that has nothing to do with what I was even talking about. And what do Nokia's apps have to do with wp7 losing dev support if wp8 takes off? You will have wp7 with minimal third party support and, oh yeah, some Nokia apps. yay
That's not really that hard. You could take any Android phone with hdmi out and USB otg, put in a shoebox, run the hdmi cable and controller cable to the usb, turn it on to Shadowgun and call it a console. It's too easy to even be a real test of whether this is real or not. And it's a moot point now anyway. They have their money hopefully we'll get our console.
As such "Hacker Highschool" is doomed to attract everything from raised eyebrows to terminology-holy-wars.
Perfect. Sounds like a gimme for easy publicity. Not only that but one of their main goals is to "reverse this negative stereotype of hacking by encouraging teens to embrace ethical, responsible hacking". So if they are doing good work that fits the original definition of hacking and part of their mission is to change the perception of the word hacking then what better way to do that than to associate good deeds with "Hacker Highschool".
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
You are an idiot. Reparse the sentence. He's saying Nokia essentially stopped dead in its tracks with windows phone. The GP is talking about decades of Nokia building great hardware [that continually push the boundaries of what is possible]. They have been stuck with variations of the same windows phone specced shit since they delivered the first Lumia. And since "there is no plan B", they weren't about to just put Symbian or Meego on some real high spec stuff. Oh no, fuck making money when we Nokia can just collectively lick Ballmers ballsack, right? All the while the rest of the industry has moved forward with HD screens, dual-sim handsets, and with native coding and high performance GPUs the ability to play honest to goodness real 3D games.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out.
What separates a fanboy from a mere platform enthusiast? The enthusiast honestly admits when the platform vision has ran off the rails and the fanboy just makes excuses. Listen, drone, the people buying Windows Phones today that go home on a 2 year contract are getting screwed. First of all, obviously they won't be getting the wp8 upgrade they'll have to make do with the window dressing wp7.8 shit sandwich. Do you think at&t is telling them that? Ha! Secondly, they are getting screwed because when windows phone 8 drops it has a lot of new features that developers have been asking for like native code. Native code on a phone is good for amongst others, 2 main things: 1) some code runs much faster in optimized native form rather than jitted managed code and 2) porting software from one platform to another. The next time you talk to one of your betters, ask to see his Android phone and install an app called Addons Detector. Run it and marvel at how many apps use the NDK for native code. Guess what? Many of those apps will be the ones getting ported to wp8. Practically none will ever see the light of day on wp7. So while your wp8 wielding peers are rocking out on Shadowgun and Deadspace, you will have to console yourself with yet another playthrough of Angry Birds (that is on your market right? Ha ha). And if miracle of miracles wp8 actually takes off and gets a sizable number of users, guess what happens to wp7 dev support? Go bye bye. Windows Phone devs will be too busy chasing the real market and your wp7 might as well be an OpenMoko Freerunner as far as they're concerned as a rounding error of market share isn't worth developing for. If wp8 takes off, prepare for your lumia 900 to be all but abandoned inside of a year (into your multi-year contract). Guess what? You got screwed! And even if wp8 doesn't take off, that only means not only are they screwing you behind your back but they're scewing you directly to your face because MS and Nokia's every intention is for wp8 to succeed so if their vision succeeds, they know your handset will be losing serious dev support.
Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
Oh this trolling again? You think you have an actual point with this? Guess what, bucko? Unlike above where wp7 loses developer support, Gingerbread has over a hundred million users and any Android dev that writes an app using newer api's is prompted to download the compatibility library before the project even gets loaded the first time in Eclipse. See, Google gives a shit about their users of older devices in the most important way. Not window dressing bullshit but actual backwards compatibility. So keep ignoring reality and argue in soundbites
Wouldn't it be interesting to have a computer vision system advanced enough to comb through every digital image it could find anywhere including video stills, the internet, usenet, what have you and be able to recognize discrete objects then put them in a reverse sorted list starting with "1" objects that only showed up once in any photograph ever and then to "2" and so forth. I bet some fascinating discoveries could be made.
If you know you're going to win why pay for a defense? Just represent yourself. The facts in the case are self-evident.
I let them know what I thought about the situation and how they could help recover at least a little goodwill. Dropping the requirement for them to respond individually to the ridiculous "complaints" would be a good start.
Try to see the humor in the scene, get a good chuckle and move on. That's what I do.
Linpus was the craptastic Linux MSI used for a little while
Apparently you need a history lesson too. It was Acer that shipped Linpus on the Aspire One. I got mixed up because that's the model I had until I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. MSI shipped with SUSE onboard.
And they didn't quit selling it because MSFT offered them a deal
I didn't say they did. I didn't even imply it. What I said was:
XP was familiar and would run on the little laptops (they weren't really netbooks anymore) and MS recovered the market pretty quickly.
Which is in agreement with this:
Dude, just accept it, you have to give the people what they want and Linux don't.
So I'm 3 sentences in to your post and sentence 1 was you trying to condescend me about something that you can't get wrong in the very next breath. Sentence 2 is you confirming that you don't know what you're talking about. And sentence 3 is you arguing against something I didn't even say. What is the point of having a conversation with you?
Heh. If people are so worried about "good" coders then start some kind of exclusive app store. Lay down the law that only correct code is allowed in here! I'm sure they'll come running by the dozens.
Paying MS a chunk of money for each Android device doesn't decrease the windows mindshare whilst it does support MS for doing basically nothing.
If a consumer buys an Android device in lieu of a Windows device be it phone or tablet then that does dilute Windows' mindshare. Not only that but it is a precedent at least in the tablet space since most people are used to equating computer=Microsoft and tablets while not completely breaking that chain of thought certainly weaken it. Most people aren't rich and if they buy a tablet at all only buy one so if they're buying an Android they are almost certainly not buying another Windows laptop or any hypothetical Microsoft tablet. I am not wild about the patent license thing but it is what it is right now so we have to accept it. The silver lining is that while it seems like a lot of money it is "paltry" compared to what MS and its ecosystem partnerswould have gotten had they sold an entire device instead of just taxing the Android one. When a tablet sells at least a couple of hundred dollars are made on it by the various entities in the chain. The OEM makes money, their suppliers make money, MS makes money, the retailer makes money etc. If that unit shifts with Windows everybody knows about it and it strengthens the collective resolve to promote those products but if Android or Linux shift then the opposite happens and while MS gets their patent fee, they lose the after sale leverage over the consumer and they lose that tiny amount of grip over the supply chain. They would gladly give up that patent fee to sell Windows units even if it meant making nothing in the process because of the overall effect.
MS' greatest power is mindshare with the consumer and their OEM licensing power and they are loath to lose even a little bit of that. It's like back in the netbook days, they turned on a dime to give away XP and that was just to fight pathetic little Linpus Linux on the Eee PC. Right now they are completely flipping their number one flagship product around and pissing a lot of people off in the process just to compete with the iPad. And the iPad sells nowhere near what PCs sell in a month. Yet they are going so far as to force not-Metro on their server product. They don't give a shit about the patent fees on Linux and Android as even hundreds of million a year are a drop in the bucket compared to Office and Windows profits. What they want is to sew FUD and when people get up in arms over it the FUD is working. I hesitate to use a charged word but it is almost a form of terror (no disrespect to real terror victims) and if you play along and get scared, they win. Just pay the fees and get over it because in the long run they still lose.
There are more Android phones out there, so people are more likely to own one.
If you break down smartphone model from a random sampling of the US population people are more likely to have an iPhone as it is the best selling single family of devices. However Android being the best selling OS, you are more likely to find that across the range of devices the people would have.
They are much more likely to be the 'default' choice while picking a phone (free with a contract, etc) so people are less likely to be using them. If you care enough to select and pay the premium for an iPhone, you're more likely to actually use it.
That is completely orthogonal to my point.
I have a Galaxy Nexus and it in no way replaces either of my tablets. Maybe one of the Galaxy Notes at 5.5 inches but most people aren't interested in carrying something that size in their pockets. I think 7 inches is the minimum to comfortably use for tablet duty and nobody wants a phone that size. You bring up an interesting point though and I could be wrong.