As I write this, the only comments posted so far are the usual sarcastic quips. But this is huge. Beyond huge.
For the first time, an artificially produced cloned organ has been created and transplanted. Someone has received an organ that has zero chance of rejection and will heal to a completely natural state.
I give it less than a decade before more complex organs like hearts or kidneys are transplanted for the first time.
I can see why you posted AC. No one would want even a made up ID attached to such a clumsy troll, and I almost can't believe I am replying.
You are linking to average household income. In the last 40 years a radical thing happened and most of those households went from single earner to two earners. So what it's demonstrating is that over the last 40 years a majority of households had to double the number of people working just to gain a roughly 25% increase in real income. Sounds like a loss to me.
The post that you linked appears to be somewhat... misleading. I did a quick glance it is seems to be a set of talking points around lies, damn lies and (most importantly) statistics. The first graph builds in 'compensation' along with wages. It's an undefined term and my guess is that it includes things like heavily hedged retirement funds and stock options. The growth line certainly looks like it spikes at the 90s tech bubble and everyone knows how that turned out in terms of long term worth. It also doesn't say how it includes or doesn't include things like medicare.
The second graph is good old fashioned cherry-picked statistics. They have taken one small sector that goes against the general trend. Then they have chopped off the information that disagrees with them. Note that all their other graphs start in the 60s or earlier. This one starts after '85. Then they have compressed the axis to make it look like a much larger gain. So their (presumably) strongest supporting evidence is an industry (manufacturing) that has seen the largest layoffs and off-shoring in the period they chose to include, leaving behind mostly senior positions, and it still only resulted in a 20% wage increase over 20 years.
The rest of their graphs are cherry-picking goods that have in general gone against inflation trends and comparing them to wages. For example, the price of computers or eggs has gone against inflation. They are effectively de-adjusting for inflation and then acting like the bigger number is relevant.
Finally, it's a website that advertises itself as a supporter of the Austrian School of economics. These are the people who believe in complete deregulation of everything, no taxes of any kind and that the only appropriate government spending under any circumstances is military. In any serious discussion the outlier fanatics of any sort need to be taken with a grain of salt, regardless of the side of the discussion.
No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek... We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks
A large part of this is a failure to adequately account for human nature, consumer culture and changes in wealth distribution. Back in the 60s and 70s and 80s when each new revolution in automation hit all the magazines and news programs were full of news that, since this wold double our productivity, in another decade everyone would have to work half as much.
And it's true. As a society we could provide everyone from top to bottom with an 60's upper-middleclass lifestyle for only a day or two of work each week. Why didn't this happen? First, it relies on the idea that there is some fixed goal that everyone is working towards. That once everyone has filled their checklist of stuff they are done. Instead, there is always more stuff being made and marketed. Consumer culture is as much a moving target as productivity is. The supply expands to fill the available capital.
More importantly, the people who enjoyed increased productivity are very rarely the people who benefit from it. If a factory doubles its output the owners don't double wages. It is the same across every industry. Word processing and e-mail didn't free up time for office workers. It just spelled the end of their secretaries.
This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.
So massive gains in efficiency have been made. But those who enjoy the resulting gains are never those who are generating more work.
See, that's exactly the scenario that would (rightly) draw the biggest and most aggressive government response. Microsoft got spanked for doing something similar in the browser market, and that was arguably playing in their own backyard. A company intentionally attempting to drive an entire industry into bankruptcy in order to improve unrelated spin-off services? The sales wouldn't even go through before the regulators stepped in and then stepped all over it.
I suspect that fear of a response like this would generate is the only thing that has stopped full-scale hostile takeovers up to this point.
Every time these types of things rear their head, I can't help but think one thought.
The Music industry isn't very big.
Or at least, not particularly valuable. They are small potatoes. Tin gods that have been acting like 500 pound gorillas for so long that it doesn't get generally questioned. But they are tiny. Miniscule.
It's a slippery number to pin down, but what I see tossed around when the value of the recording industry comes up is yearly revenues in the range of 10 Billion, give or take a couple. Grand total, worldwide. Not just new music or record sales or some small slice, but the grand total yearly gross revenue.
The market cap of Apple alone is in the 300 Billion range. The iPad by itself will likely have a higher revenue this year than the entire music industry. And the other players in the market are people like Google and Amazon and Microsoft. The music industry is repeatedly going out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of a market that is at least one order of magnitude larger than them.
So far it hasn't be worth the trouble of swatting the mosquitoes. Any modern attempt to replicate what Sony did in the 80s and absorb a significant chunk of the music industry will be met with the mother of all corporate and government battles. It would open more anti-trust, market capture, licensing and trade issues, etc. than even their armies of bored lawyers want to contemplate. Even if every interested party in the technology world got together as a consortium to buy out the record companies and license everything on open and non-discriminatory terms it would kick off the legal battle of the century.
But at some point it will be worth it. Between Google and Amazon's services and the massive data center that Apple just built, the tech companies may have spent more in the last year to create these services than the record industry will collectively bring in. If the mice don't learn to fear the cats they will be eaten.
A 3D printer is not a replicator, you know. You don't just plug in "iPhone" and come out with a fully functional iPhone.
A replicator? Well, for solids and structural shapes, yes they are. Right now you can print working parts (with embedded working parts) done in some of the same hard plastics (or metals) that production designs are done in. I have designed and printed such things myself.
Can you 'print' an iPhone? Not with any single machine right now. But it's far passed the point where such a thing is an impossibility and has instead moved on to an engineering challenge. How about combining an additive printer with a CNC mill and a pick-and-place machine. All three are based on similar three-axis designs. In fact, I've seen several 'hobby' machines that can be converted from printer to CNC.
So something that can print a case, including the required electrical connections. Then (or rather, simultaneously) drop in the specialist chips/battery/screen where they need to go. Use the CNC abilities for final polish and you are good to go. There is no reason that you shouldn't be able to take a working phone out of the printer and turn it on, still warm.
Such a device is not beyond what could be built now, immediately. It's simply a question of cost and demand. Even five years ago there was no realistic demand for hobbyist printers/CNC and what there was had astronomical prices. Now there is a thriving community, a bunch of home brew and several commercial companies looking seriously at entering the market at affordable prices. In five more years I'll be shocked if far more ambitions solutions are not available.
Actually, many commercial 3D printers make very polished final products. In some cases these prototypes may actually be of higher quality and more durable than the final mass produced version.
The problem is that the unit price scales very poorly once you scale up from making five to test to five million to sell.
Now, it's entirely possible that given enough R&D and experiments 3D printers can be developed where the higher cost of production is more than offset by the lack of shipping and the customizability of the final product. Ten years from now our purchase decisions could very well boil down to "cheap and generic from China" or "customized and immediate from the local shop"
Really? Is the pace of phone hardware development so fast that there are significant changes every few months? Now, I love seeing a large variety of devices on the market, but a yearly release schedule doesn't sound unrealistic in terms of keeping us with actual development.
No reason why every home cannot be wired with 50 different lines? Really?
If you mean that fiber optics are small enough that it is physically possible for 50 lines to be run to one home, then sure. But that has never really been a barrier to entry.
Who is going to let 50 different companies dig up their yard? Is there room for 50 different switching stations in the neighborhood?
Besides, it's great to say that with smaller technology anyone is free to run their lines. But the real barrier to entry is the need to duplicate what the incumbent companies have built up over half a century before you can offer competition. It's a massive and almost insurmountable barrier to entry. That's why it's a natural monopoly, not the lines to the houses.
The right to privacy from your own phone? You realize that this is the thing that you use to send you conversations with people over the air through a series of third party servers? If you are afraid of your phone hearing your conversations or your GPS knowing where it is then it is long past time for you to check out of modern society.
Purposefully hidden from the user? In the same sense that the rest of the system files are busy in the background running the system.
And yes, these kinds of things are necessary in a smartphone. At least as long as a smartphone is defined as more than a regular phone with a big-ass screen.
This whole thing is incredibly bizarre. People are complaining that their GPS knows where it's been. Think about that. Next they will be complaining that their phone keeps track of their calls. The horror!
The information doesn't even get sent anywhere. It is collected by the phone for its own use. Sure, when you back the phone up to your computer this gets moved along with everything else. Darn Apple for backing up your phone when you tell it to back up your phone. How thoughtless. You'd think they would at least include an option to encrypt it so that no one could... oh, wait they did. With a single easy-to-use checkbox option.
Seriously, if anyone out there is this paranoid about anyone going through their backups or phones then a smart-phone is probably not the tool for them. If anyone really is going through your backups they have physical access to your computer and phone and your position history is probably the least of your worries. Grow up. Yes, the iPhone (and every other smartphone) keeps more information then phones (or anything else) did twenty years ago. They also do more things than anything did twenty years ago. That's the selling point.
Well, depending on when this happened University mail systems may have been involved. One or both parties or someone that was forwarded or copied on the messages may have be using a commercial e-mail provider. There are a lot of scenarios where there could be independent 3rd party copies of these messages.
Even if no copies come to light immediately Zuckerberg's lawyers are going to be very, very careful about claiming they are false if there is ANY chance they are real. Nothing would go worse for them than claiming the messages as forgeries and then having someone come forward with third party proof.
Wait. Microsoft did a major change in their software. After upgrading to the new version of Word you discovered that Adobe's four year old software didn't know how to talk to Microsoft's brand new software. And this is Adobe's fault?
Something that comes up over and over in patent discussion is how ridiculous it is that sticking 'internet' or 'cloud' or 'electronic' or any other buzzword in front of something seems to qualify it as a new invention. We all sigh that computers don't automatically make old ideas new or require special treatment just because a processor or network is involved.
Same goes for fraud or any other criminal activity. Just because computers are involved doesn't mean that old solutions and ideas are magically invalid. Too often we have a tendency to treat computer related problems as some sort of special case. So we turn to solutions that are situational and often poor in the long run. Screw Google. Complaining to them about this is like complaining to the pawn shop selling your stolen TV.
Just because they are buying in bulk doesn't mean the parts are sitting in a warehouse somewhere ready to ship. Instead picture an order for ten million components, to be delivered at five hundred thousand a month for twenty months. Most of those parts are going to come off the production line only days or weeks before they end up in the final product, but the order was bulk.
The distance between the planet and the star matters very much for the occultation method. That's because planets that are far away from their stars don't orbit very often. We are exceptionally unlikely to spot a planet that only orbits once a century with a telescope that has only been looking for a year.
I think you are mixing up cause and effect. Before Apple ditched everything else in favor of USB there was effectively no consumer goods on the market using USB. Then Apple created a captive market. It wasn't a huge market but it was one that by definition had money to spend on USB devices and that was enough to get them made. And once USB versions were available they often provided a superior product, even if it cost a little more. Then people started bitching because of how poor Windows support was for USB. Hence, improved USB support.
Just image a world without USB. A world where you have to specifically install a driver for every device you plug in. Friend comes over with a flash memory stick? Hope he brought the floppy with the drivers for that manufacturer and model.
How is this news? Apple tends to stick to annual release schedules. iPad launched in April. April is now 2 months away. Breaking news! Product in production two months before it goes on sale!
The only news would be if the iPad2 WASN'T in production already.
The existing Android 2.2 tablets are orders of magnitude more complex than the Ipad. Sorry but the two just aren't compatible in terms of functionality.
Yeah, one works out of the box. The other needs to hit the ROM sites every couple months after the manufacturers get bored. I agree, not very comparable at all.
Not quite. Everyone else released a beta. Apple released a finished product. And they did it a year ahead of their first real competition's 'beta' products. And yes, while tablets are still more on the toy side of the product category that shouldn't be an excuse to release a half-assed product. The competition is releasing products that are neither ahead of the curve or polished. That's just sloppy and sad.
Wow, good thing you went with the open platform otherwise you might have had to compile your own hacked third party OS update together when the manufacturer bailed on you. Just think of the hours you could have not spent searching through forums and triple checking instructions. Good thing you didn't fall into Apple's trap./sarcasm
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As I write this, the only comments posted so far are the usual sarcastic quips. But this is huge. Beyond huge.
For the first time, an artificially produced cloned organ has been created and transplanted. Someone has received an organ that has zero chance of rejection and will heal to a completely natural state.
I give it less than a decade before more complex organs like hearts or kidneys are transplanted for the first time.
I can see why you posted AC. No one would want even a made up ID attached to such a clumsy troll, and I almost can't believe I am replying.
You are linking to average household income. In the last 40 years a radical thing happened and most of those households went from single earner to two earners. So what it's demonstrating is that over the last 40 years a majority of households had to double the number of people working just to gain a roughly 25% increase in real income. Sounds like a loss to me.
The post that you linked appears to be somewhat... misleading. I did a quick glance it is seems to be a set of talking points around lies, damn lies and (most importantly) statistics. The first graph builds in 'compensation' along with wages. It's an undefined term and my guess is that it includes things like heavily hedged retirement funds and stock options. The growth line certainly looks like it spikes at the 90s tech bubble and everyone knows how that turned out in terms of long term worth. It also doesn't say how it includes or doesn't include things like medicare.
The second graph is good old fashioned cherry-picked statistics. They have taken one small sector that goes against the general trend. Then they have chopped off the information that disagrees with them. Note that all their other graphs start in the 60s or earlier. This one starts after '85. Then they have compressed the axis to make it look like a much larger gain. So their (presumably) strongest supporting evidence is an industry (manufacturing) that has seen the largest layoffs and off-shoring in the period they chose to include, leaving behind mostly senior positions, and it still only resulted in a 20% wage increase over 20 years.
The rest of their graphs are cherry-picking goods that have in general gone against inflation trends and comparing them to wages. For example, the price of computers or eggs has gone against inflation. They are effectively de-adjusting for inflation and then acting like the bigger number is relevant.
Finally, it's a website that advertises itself as a supporter of the Austrian School of economics. These are the people who believe in complete deregulation of everything, no taxes of any kind and that the only appropriate government spending under any circumstances is military. In any serious discussion the outlier fanatics of any sort need to be taken with a grain of salt, regardless of the side of the discussion.
I grabbed my info from here, somewhat ironically also referencing the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's a quick and dirty link but in-line with what I have see in the past across various web and print publications.
No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek... We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks
A large part of this is a failure to adequately account for human nature, consumer culture and changes in wealth distribution. Back in the 60s and 70s and 80s when each new revolution in automation hit all the magazines and news programs were full of news that, since this wold double our productivity, in another decade everyone would have to work half as much.
And it's true. As a society we could provide everyone from top to bottom with an 60's upper-middleclass lifestyle for only a day or two of work each week. Why didn't this happen? First, it relies on the idea that there is some fixed goal that everyone is working towards. That once everyone has filled their checklist of stuff they are done. Instead, there is always more stuff being made and marketed. Consumer culture is as much a moving target as productivity is. The supply expands to fill the available capital.
More importantly, the people who enjoyed increased productivity are very rarely the people who benefit from it. If a factory doubles its output the owners don't double wages. It is the same across every industry. Word processing and e-mail didn't free up time for office workers. It just spelled the end of their secretaries.
This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.
So massive gains in efficiency have been made. But those who enjoy the resulting gains are never those who are generating more work.
See, that's exactly the scenario that would (rightly) draw the biggest and most aggressive government response. Microsoft got spanked for doing something similar in the browser market, and that was arguably playing in their own backyard. A company intentionally attempting to drive an entire industry into bankruptcy in order to improve unrelated spin-off services? The sales wouldn't even go through before the regulators stepped in and then stepped all over it.
I suspect that fear of a response like this would generate is the only thing that has stopped full-scale hostile takeovers up to this point.
Every time these types of things rear their head, I can't help but think one thought.
The Music industry isn't very big.
Or at least, not particularly valuable. They are small potatoes. Tin gods that have been acting like 500 pound gorillas for so long that it doesn't get generally questioned. But they are tiny. Miniscule.
It's a slippery number to pin down, but what I see tossed around when the value of the recording industry comes up is yearly revenues in the range of 10 Billion, give or take a couple. Grand total, worldwide. Not just new music or record sales or some small slice, but the grand total yearly gross revenue.
The market cap of Apple alone is in the 300 Billion range. The iPad by itself will likely have a higher revenue this year than the entire music industry. And the other players in the market are people like Google and Amazon and Microsoft. The music industry is repeatedly going out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of a market that is at least one order of magnitude larger than them.
So far it hasn't be worth the trouble of swatting the mosquitoes. Any modern attempt to replicate what Sony did in the 80s and absorb a significant chunk of the music industry will be met with the mother of all corporate and government battles. It would open more anti-trust, market capture, licensing and trade issues, etc. than even their armies of bored lawyers want to contemplate. Even if every interested party in the technology world got together as a consortium to buy out the record companies and license everything on open and non-discriminatory terms it would kick off the legal battle of the century.
But at some point it will be worth it. Between Google and Amazon's services and the massive data center that Apple just built, the tech companies may have spent more in the last year to create these services than the record industry will collectively bring in. If the mice don't learn to fear the cats they will be eaten.
A 3D printer is not a replicator, you know. You don't just plug in "iPhone" and come out with a fully functional iPhone.
A replicator? Well, for solids and structural shapes, yes they are. Right now you can print working parts (with embedded working parts) done in some of the same hard plastics (or metals) that production designs are done in. I have designed and printed such things myself.
Can you 'print' an iPhone? Not with any single machine right now. But it's far passed the point where such a thing is an impossibility and has instead moved on to an engineering challenge. How about combining an additive printer with a CNC mill and a pick-and-place machine. All three are based on similar three-axis designs. In fact, I've seen several 'hobby' machines that can be converted from printer to CNC.
So something that can print a case, including the required electrical connections. Then (or rather, simultaneously) drop in the specialist chips/battery/screen where they need to go. Use the CNC abilities for final polish and you are good to go. There is no reason that you shouldn't be able to take a working phone out of the printer and turn it on, still warm.
Such a device is not beyond what could be built now, immediately. It's simply a question of cost and demand. Even five years ago there was no realistic demand for hobbyist printers/CNC and what there was had astronomical prices. Now there is a thriving community, a bunch of home brew and several commercial companies looking seriously at entering the market at affordable prices. In five more years I'll be shocked if far more ambitions solutions are not available.
Actually, many commercial 3D printers make very polished final products. In some cases these prototypes may actually be of higher quality and more durable than the final mass produced version.
The problem is that the unit price scales very poorly once you scale up from making five to test to five million to sell.
Now, it's entirely possible that given enough R&D and experiments 3D printers can be developed where the higher cost of production is more than offset by the lack of shipping and the customizability of the final product. Ten years from now our purchase decisions could very well boil down to "cheap and generic from China" or "customized and immediate from the local shop"
Really? Is the pace of phone hardware development so fast that there are significant changes every few months? Now, I love seeing a large variety of devices on the market, but a yearly release schedule doesn't sound unrealistic in terms of keeping us with actual development.
And? What percentage of the population do you think has children young enough to wake them on a regular basis? I'd be shocked if it's as high as 5%
No reason why every home cannot be wired with 50 different lines? Really?
If you mean that fiber optics are small enough that it is physically possible for 50 lines to be run to one home, then sure. But that has never really been a barrier to entry.
Who is going to let 50 different companies dig up their yard? Is there room for 50 different switching stations in the neighborhood?
Besides, it's great to say that with smaller technology anyone is free to run their lines. But the real barrier to entry is the need to duplicate what the incumbent companies have built up over half a century before you can offer competition. It's a massive and almost insurmountable barrier to entry. That's why it's a natural monopoly, not the lines to the houses.
The right to privacy from your own phone? You realize that this is the thing that you use to send you conversations with people over the air through a series of third party servers? If you are afraid of your phone hearing your conversations or your GPS knowing where it is then it is long past time for you to check out of modern society.
Purposefully hidden from the user? In the same sense that the rest of the system files are busy in the background running the system.
And yes, these kinds of things are necessary in a smartphone. At least as long as a smartphone is defined as more than a regular phone with a big-ass screen.
This whole thing is incredibly bizarre. People are complaining that their GPS knows where it's been. Think about that. Next they will be complaining that their phone keeps track of their calls. The horror!
The information doesn't even get sent anywhere. It is collected by the phone for its own use. Sure, when you back the phone up to your computer this gets moved along with everything else. Darn Apple for backing up your phone when you tell it to back up your phone. How thoughtless. You'd think they would at least include an option to encrypt it so that no one could... oh, wait they did. With a single easy-to-use checkbox option.
Seriously, if anyone out there is this paranoid about anyone going through their backups or phones then a smart-phone is probably not the tool for them. If anyone really is going through your backups they have physical access to your computer and phone and your position history is probably the least of your worries. Grow up. Yes, the iPhone (and every other smartphone) keeps more information then phones (or anything else) did twenty years ago. They also do more things than anything did twenty years ago. That's the selling point.
Well, depending on when this happened University mail systems may have been involved. One or both parties or someone that was forwarded or copied on the messages may have be using a commercial e-mail provider. There are a lot of scenarios where there could be independent 3rd party copies of these messages.
Even if no copies come to light immediately Zuckerberg's lawyers are going to be very, very careful about claiming they are false if there is ANY chance they are real. Nothing would go worse for them than claiming the messages as forgeries and then having someone come forward with third party proof.
Wait. Microsoft did a major change in their software. After upgrading to the new version of Word you discovered that Adobe's four year old software didn't know how to talk to Microsoft's brand new software. And this is Adobe's fault?
It's one of those things where even if Elements (or Gimp or whatever) does 99% of what you need it only takes that 1% to be deeply annoying.
Someone with mod points give parent a bump.
Something that comes up over and over in patent discussion is how ridiculous it is that sticking 'internet' or 'cloud' or 'electronic' or any other buzzword in front of something seems to qualify it as a new invention. We all sigh that computers don't automatically make old ideas new or require special treatment just because a processor or network is involved.
Same goes for fraud or any other criminal activity. Just because computers are involved doesn't mean that old solutions and ideas are magically invalid. Too often we have a tendency to treat computer related problems as some sort of special case. So we turn to solutions that are situational and often poor in the long run. Screw Google. Complaining to them about this is like complaining to the pawn shop selling your stolen TV.
Just because they are buying in bulk doesn't mean the parts are sitting in a warehouse somewhere ready to ship. Instead picture an order for ten million components, to be delivered at five hundred thousand a month for twenty months. Most of those parts are going to come off the production line only days or weeks before they end up in the final product, but the order was bulk.
The distance between the planet and the star matters very much for the occultation method. That's because planets that are far away from their stars don't orbit very often. We are exceptionally unlikely to spot a planet that only orbits once a century with a telescope that has only been looking for a year.
I think you are mixing up cause and effect. Before Apple ditched everything else in favor of USB there was effectively no consumer goods on the market using USB. Then Apple created a captive market. It wasn't a huge market but it was one that by definition had money to spend on USB devices and that was enough to get them made. And once USB versions were available they often provided a superior product, even if it cost a little more. Then people started bitching because of how poor Windows support was for USB. Hence, improved USB support.
Just image a world without USB. A world where you have to specifically install a driver for every device you plug in. Friend comes over with a flash memory stick? Hope he brought the floppy with the drivers for that manufacturer and model.
How is this news? Apple tends to stick to annual release schedules. iPad launched in April. April is now 2 months away. Breaking news! Product in production two months before it goes on sale!
The only news would be if the iPad2 WASN'T in production already.
A single accidental homonym in a post made at 1:30 in the morning? Thank you for the correction, but honestly I feel no shame.
The existing Android 2.2 tablets are orders of magnitude more complex than the Ipad. Sorry but the two just aren't compatible in terms of functionality.
Yeah, one works out of the box. The other needs to hit the ROM sites every couple months after the manufacturers get bored. I agree, not very comparable at all.
Not quite. Everyone else released a beta. Apple released a finished product. And they did it a year ahead of their first real competition's 'beta' products. And yes, while tablets are still more on the toy side of the product category that shouldn't be an excuse to release a half-assed product. The competition is releasing products that are neither ahead of the curve or polished. That's just sloppy and sad.
Wow, good thing you went with the open platform otherwise you might have had to compile your own hacked third party OS update together when the manufacturer bailed on you. Just think of the hours you could have not spent searching through forums and triple checking instructions. Good thing you didn't fall into Apple's trap. /sarcasm