The mail app on iPhone sucked balls when it was released and sucks slightly smaller balls now. I owned an iPhone 2G from a few months after release, and I used an iPhone 3G until a month ago. I liked much about the iPhones but always loathed the email app. Chattermail on my old Treo 650 kicked the pants off of it years ago. The lack of IMAP IDLE is an unforgiveable sin and I ditched the whole iPhone platform because there was no way for me to get push email without sharing my IMAP server login with a third party service or switching to Exchange.
Just because it's good enough for grandma and grandpa doesn't mean it's good enough for everybody. The point is on Android you aren't stuck with the mediocre apps the system comes with. You can easily replace basically any part of the system you want.
And I never said Apple rejects lots of apps - I said there are lots of very popular, successful Android apps (not a small list at all - a significant percentage of the most popular Android apps out there) that wouldn't exist or be approved by Apple. Such apps generally don't get developed in the first place either because there is no officially supported way to write them or because developers know Apple will never approve them. The cases we hear about in the press are generally the borderline cases where they thought they'd get approved, but Apple nixed them or where Apple initially approved them then changed their minds.
The old 10.0.45 version of it appears to still be downloadable from here (not sure if there was another version after that).
However, given the rate at which security issues crop up in Flash, you are probably better off using the nspluginwrapper thunking stuff or other method for your distro that makes the 32 bit plugin work on 64 bit Linux, rather than running an out of date Flash plugin.
See my other post where I address this. Yes, that is part of the truth, but it's all related to the openness of the platform - the plethora of inexpensive and high end handsets, the availability of Android on non-AT&T networks, and the ability to run any software you want.
Being able to run the software you want (and I don't just mean stuff that's not in the Market - I agree that Joe Average doesn't directly care about that, though there are peripheral benefits from that openness that he may enjoy) is a big feature of an open platform like Android. The examples I cited in my other post of top-100 Android apps that would be banned on the iPhone platform (Beautiful Widgets, Flash, Handcent SMS, K9mail, Launcher Pro and so on) proves the point that these things do matter to people even if they don't explicitly ever think to themselves "gee, I like Android because it's a more open platform".
Well, I suppose I oversimplified things when I said Android's popularity is in large part because "you can run the apps you want". The reason Android is succeeding is that it's an open ecosystem - it's on lots of different phones, from lots of manufacturers, running on all the different GSM and CDMA networks in the US. There are entry level Android phones for Joe "Cheapskates" Average who just wants apps on a cheap phone, and power-user smartphones like the Evo 4G and Nexus One.
But yeah, actually, if you look at the some of the best and most popular apps people are downloading, a *ton* of them would be banned on the iPhone - again, open ecosystem. LauncherPro? Banned - replaces a key piece of OS functionality. K9mail? Banned - duplicates the official email app. Beautiful Widgets - banned, widgets and behavior modifications to the desktop are disallowed. Handcent SMS? Banned - duplicates the official SMS app. NESoid (and all the emulators) - banned, emulation disallowed. Flash Player - banned, Flash is disallowed. Pandora Radio - exists but sort of sucks because it can't run in the background (well, will probably be able to with iOS 4).
So though I admit there's more to it than just being able to run whatever apps you want, but it's a significant benefit of an open platform and just looking at the apps people seem to download in droves supports this.
I just checked and Google.com still shows a "Change Background Image" link in the lower left corner, so it looks more like it's still an option, they just realized they confused people by defaulting it to on for a few hours.
Anyway, it's just an option now. Nobody's forcing you to use it. I suspect the Slashdot crowd keeps it pretty real on the "give me a plain white background or give me death" tip, but a lot of people like this sort of silly eye candy.
Anybody else remember back when we all switched to using Google *because* of the plain white background and simple layout?
Well, the Android phones have been having quite an impact in the market recently. The big benefit of "being able to run the software you want rather than what Steve Jobs says you can run" seems to speak to people, since that's the major thing Android has going for it that the iPhone doesn't.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but there already is something that works somewhat like what you describe - it's called bankruptcy. In a bankruptcy, the equity shares of a company are generally declared worthless. In some cases, strict priority is violated and a small amount goes to equity holders, but generally they get nothing to speak of.
So if the government fines a company an amount greater than the equity value of the firm, it is highly unlikely that most companies will be able to take on that much incremental debt, and the company will be forced into a bankruptcy filing, the bondholders will be paid back and the excess liquidation value will go to pay the fines, and that's that.
There are of course complicating factors and reasons this doesn't generally happen to large multinational firms (mostly that their large size makes them usually able to shrug off such fines, and that fines are usually proportional to the offense rather than the size of a company). But it's possible in theory.
A complicating issue here is that BP isn't actually a US-based firm, nor is it natively listed on a US stock exchange. It trades through ADRs on NYSE - it is natively listed on the London Stock Exchange, I believe. So... if ADRs are subject to seizure but shares on foreign exchanges aren't, capital just flees to foreign exchanges and nobody wants to list on NYSE and NASDAQ anymore. That wouldn't be a good thing.
Seizure of US-based assets of a firm is at least a more plausible method of punishment. I'm not sure what BP's domestic assets are worth in the US, but it seems like the damage to the company's market value is probably already on par with the value of its US assets. So if you seized them and sold them off to other oil firms as punishment for this, the likely result would just be the remaining foreign assets would be acquired or merged into another company, and those are probably worth something on the order of the $109B market cap left in BP right now, or at least aren't worth much less (that's just a guess based on what I've read about BP's operations).
The net result of all that would be the equity shareholders would probably end up *better off* than they are right now in the event of an asset seizure, or at the least, they wouldn't be much worse off than they are now. Another way of putting it is that the stock market has basically discounted the value of the US assets of BP to nothing already, because if they were spun off, they'd most likely have to be bundled with the huge liability from this oil spill.
Now, let me take issue with one point you made that's just wrong:
The stockholders are supposed to be closely supervising their employees so stuff like this doesn't happen in the first place
No. That's what a Board of Directors is supposed to do. These guys get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in even a moderate sized company to represent the shareholders and supervise the executive team of a company. Joe Shmoe who invests his savings in a mutual fund or buys stock in a bunch of companies can't realistically be expected to know when malfeasance is going on in the corporate offices of a firm. But the Board can and should, at least up to a point.
Sarbannes-Oxley put a lot on the shoulders of the CEO of a publicly traded company in terms of personally certifying accounting and reporting results. There's relatively little out there that holds Boards of Directors responsible for really managing and overseeing the executive team, so this has turned into a bullshit cushy position often held by people who really don't have the interest or knowledge to oversee the executive team of a company. I fully support making Boards of Directors as responsible for overseeing the CEO and executive team as the CEO is supposed to be for overseeing the rest of the firm.
No they have not been punished. The company remains practically unscathed. The notional stock value has not impacted their profits. They're still raking in money hand over fist. At their profit margins the cost of this spill won't make any serious dent. And even if it did, they'll pull an Exxon-Valdez and tie up any judgment in court for so long that they pay a fraction of what they should.
They have spent $1.25B. The market estimates that the total cost to BP of this fiasco will be around $100B. Now, you can argue the market is right or wrong, I personally don't think it will be quite that expensive to clean this mess up, but my point is that BP has accepted responsibility, is shelling out tons of cash, and expects to continue doing so for years to come and the most conservative estimates of that amount still are in the tens of billions of dollars.
The only real "punishment" you can inflict on a corporate entity is costing it cash and this is costing BP dearly. You can't beat its head into the ground, you can't embarrass it, you can't tickle its feet until it cries. Beyond money, which they have already agreed to spend a shit-pot of, if something criminal went on, you have to punish the individuals responsible for the criminal activity. The threat of jail time for negligence with other people's lives is much more effective as a deterrent for individuals engaging in illegal behavior than the any fines/forced reorganization/expropriation of assets on a corporate level will ever be.
Nice rant. I'll only bother with addressing the parts with content.
It's an odd mentality, where the cause-and-effect here wouldn't be the obvious "Executive negligence in their company losing many jobs", but rather "the public caring that the executives cut corners and ignored signs because it would cost time and thus money resulted in this disaster, and subsequent job loss".
I don't know how you got this from what I said. I never suggested that the public caring about the environment is to blame for lost jobs - I said that panicked vacation cancellations are to blame for more damage to local economies than the *actual* damage from the oil spill up to this point. And that a media frenzy contributes to this panic reaction.
Oh, the punishment! Their Q2 and Q3 earnings statements will be less glowing! They may be penalized in the market, until the expected profits return! Please. Call me when they go into the red, even for a single quarter.
Well they already have been penalized by the market. I realize that reflects expected future losses that haven't been realized yet, and that those losses in any given year probably won't be larger than their profits, but what's your point? This all reflects their assumption of a large contingent liability from this mess they created.
You are suggesting by repeatedly using the diminutive phrase "oh noes" that this isn't *real* punishment, but you fail to make clear what you think *real* punishment for a corporate entity is. Expropriation of assets by the Federal government and transfer to a state-owned oil corporation? Forced liquidation of the firm? I put forward the suggestion that these would all fail to create additional deterrence and principally have lots of negative consequences for people that weren't at fault in this incident.
I suggested in the first place that criminal negligence should be fully prosecuted against relevant individuals. I stand by that. Of course, many corporations would love to be able to operate under the corporate veil and never have the individuals involved assume responsibility for criminal behavior, but that doesn't mean we should let them and then run around tearing up corporate stock certificates, wringing our hands in fury, and trying in vain to make a legal fiction pay the price in a moral or retributive sense.
If by "real news" you mean "more media hype" then yes. We get it - the oil spill is an environmental disaster. It's bad for BP, it's really bad for fisherman in the Gulf, and it's generally bad for the economy in all the Gulf states, and it's definitely bad for the marine ecosystem.
BP has already suffered a near crippling blow. They have lost *100 billion* dollars in market cap. The CEO is going to be toast along with quite a few other people as soon as they have the situation calmed down - the board just doesn't want to toast him until things quiet down a bit. The other companies involved, Transocean, Andarko, etc. have suffered proportionally similar blows, accounting for 10s of billions of dollars in additional market cap wiped out.
And the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs in the inevitable restructurings that will come, and those jobs will end up going elsewhere, since we still will be consuming the oil here.
The only worse penalty BP as a corporate organization could pay at this point is a firesale takeover (because their successor will have to eat the huge contingent liability here). If somebody or somebodies at BP were negligent or actively broke safety regulations, then by all means, they should be criminally prosecuted for their actions. Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised. If they did something criminal, they should be prosecuted too.
But this... obsession... with personalizing "BP" as some sort of entity that has committed an evil act that we can "punish" in any way further than has already been done is baffling to me. People - it's *been* punished. There are a bunch of marketing and PR weenies on staff at BP and they are just trying to do their jobs here. There's nothing wrong with them promoting the site they put up as a source of information for the public about the oil spill.
What's more, at this point, more economic damage is actually being done by media hype than by oil itself. The damage to the Florida tourism industry isn't being caused by a few tar balls that washed up, it's being caused by panicked morons canceling their vacations because of what they saw on the news. While I'm all for BP and friends covering the costs of actual damage from their oil spill, I don't think it's reasonable to hold anybody other than the media accountable for the damage from their hype machine, and I can't blame BP's PR people for trying to do what they can to get their side of the story out there (as long as they aren't simply lying about it).
The problem with that argument is these support periods aren't currently transparent at the time of purchase. The net result is that people I know have simply delayed buying an Android phone entirely until things stabilize more. I think the early adopters will just get burned here, some may end up turning away from Android, others will just hopscotch to different manufacturers. But I suspect the ecosystem will stabilize and development will slow down enough that fragmentation won't be such a huge issue before the market is able to "punish" manufacturers who don't support their hardware very much.
Correct, I was going to point that out, but he did say "on a large scale" so he was correct too. The reason for this, I suspect, is that a combination of social/cultural homogeneity and strong community bonds are required to overcome the natural human tendencies toward greed and power-mongering.
Additionally, as another poster suggested, the communities that practice some form of communism on a local level were not formed by the sort of violent revolution of the proletariat that Marx advocated, they peacefully self-segregated from mainstream society. Violent revolution often seems to result in the most violent and cruel gaining power for themselves.
It seems that once you get to some critical size or scale of communities, combined with some critical level of heterogeneity of interests and goals, people revert back to acting in the interest of themselves, their families and their social sub-units. Which makes communism impractical.
Even European-style socialism seems to work best in homogeneous cultures. A country like the US that has so many citizens perceiving each other as "the others" rather than "one of us" inherently seems to have much less social trust between citizens, and that makes it much harder to adopt socialist-style programs.
Agreed on screen changes. But there's a major psychological issue with people shelling out hundreds of dollars for what they perceive as the "latest, greatest" phone, and then 6 months later being told they are stuck on version 1.6 when we've already gone through 2.0, 2.01, 2.1 and are about to see 2.2.
If you think this isn't real, go see the thread on Engadget right now on this topic. People are angry about it. Frankly, I'd be pretty angry if my phone was still running 1.5 (apparently a third of Android phones out there are still stuck on this old-ass version as of a few weeks ago, and a third or so were still on 1.6, with another third on 2.1).
Mind you, almost every phone has at least an *unofficial* community-produced ROM that will get them the 2.1 features and apps. Even the klunky G1 which was the first Android phone can get there - it's just not officially supported, presumably because Google, HTC and T-Mobile don't want to push down an update that replaces the SPL - I guess they think the support costs from doing that would be higher than the PR costs of not doing it.
So yeah, the issue is a bit overdone - or rather, it's not so much fragmentation of hardware specs that's the issue - I think allowing some hardware diversity is a good thing, it encourages innovation. The real issue is lack of hardware support from manufacturers and telcos after the point of sale. Google has up-to-now done basically nothing to force guaranteed support periods and guaranteed maximum release delays on a newly released OS version. I saw nothing in the article to address this.
*That* is the real issue that gets people riled up. *That* is what the users at Engadget are seething over. They want 2.1. They don't want to be told "we can't support 2.1 on your 8 month old handset, eat a dick" by HTC or Sprint or Verizon or whoever. Google is letting the carriers and hardware manufacturers release products, pimp them, then drop support 3 months later. They need to force some structure on customer support - I don't think every piece of hardware should be supported forever, but I think a year of official support for the latest version releases after the last date you sold the product is a minimum, and I think that a 2-3 month lag from Google's release of a new version to an officially supported ROM from the hardware vendor and carrier is a maximum. If a vendor falls outside of those parameters, every handset of their should be banned from the market, effective instantly.
That's the stick they need to support their customers. If Google doesn't man up and do this, I'm afraid it will do a significant amount of harm to the rapidly developing Android market.
Android 2.2 does indeed have a port of the V8 Javascript engine, which is very fast. However, for some reason, Smokescreen doesn't seem to load on my Nexus One (running 2.2 pre-release).
Of course, I have the Flash plugin set to on-demand so I can load Flash if I want to anyway, but I thought it would be cool to see this working on Android. No go for now.:(
Well, the way I read it at first, it doesn't take away your right to sue them, it just says they will no longer promise not to sue you if you sue them first.
But I think I misread the last sentence initially (see my reply here. If the license just terminated the patent grant when a lawsuit was filed, that *would* be GPLv2 compatible. Since it appears that it terminates all rights in that case, it's not currently GPLv2 compatible, though it would be a trivial modification to make it so.
Only if you consider that the last section (cancellation) refers to the rights under the whole license. If the last section just referred to the patent grant, then it wouldn't explicitly forbid you from distributing the software, it would just open you up to countersuit from google.
That's my point.
Upon reading it again, though, it says "then any rights granted to You under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed." - what it probably should say is "then the patent license grant under this section of the License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."
That would preserve GPLv2 compatibility. That was my point.
Like everything else in Android, there are 3rd party apps that allow you to do just that. For example, Flyscreen or MyLock, and Executive Assistant and Lockbot...
All allow customizations to the lock screen, lock screen widgets, or other useful information on the lock screen.
What is the NDK? It's been available for some time now. To the best of my knowledge writing a Dalvik shell to expose the app to the O/S and then using a native NDK core *is* the way to do what you are saying.
These guys ported Quake 3. It uses a lightweight Dalvik launcher to control a native build of Quake 3.
While there might be some utility to a way to write a pure native code user-facing app in C, I don't think it currently exists. Android's browser, for example, is a Dalvik wrapper around the native code. You can of course build a pure native code executable that will run on the terminal (for example, see here) but that's not going to be useful for you.
Have you tried running some apps on a Froyo-enabled Nexus One yet? There can be no doubt, Dalvik is now blazingly fast on a 1GHz snapdragon.
The only performance issues left that I've seen are:
1) For some reason, LauncherPro Beta is far smoother and snappier feeling than the stock Launcher. This was the case in 2.1 and is the case in 2.2. I use LauncherPro Beta, but really there's absolutely no excuse for the stock launcher to not be able to smoothly scroll through the home screens on such blazingly fast hardware. I don't know why the JIT didn't fix this issue with Launcher, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the way it interacts with the graphics hardware on the Nexus One, since the JIT is amazing.
2) Browser scrolling in Android Browser. Not rendering, but scrolling. In terms of page load time and rendering on a good internet connection, this is the fastest phone-based web browser I've seen. But even my iPhone 3G (which has a much less beefy processor) could scroll around on web pages without feeling... choppy. Something is wrong with the smooth scrolling algorithm, the number of frames/the amount of CPU time it uses to actually *scroll* vs. to incrementally render, or the way it puts the Javascript engine on hold or something. Please, please, please figure out how to make the web browser scroll without giving me a headache, the way iPhone does it. Cheat if you need to - skipping frames or a quick-pass and filling in once the primary scroll action is complete. Maintain smoothness at all costs. Since the browser engine is native code (just the outer UI stuff is Dalvik), this saw no benefit from JITing, and in fact is worse under 2.2 in my experience, probably because I came from CyanogenMod which is very well optimized.
If Android gets these two issues kicked, it will be amazing.
What's funny is that the regular (modified) BSD-style license, which grants *no* patent license at all, is considered GPLv2 compatible. How can a license that grants you additional rights on top of the BSD license then be *in*compatible with the GPLv2? The brain boggles...
As soon as you bring up patent grant rights, I guess you potentially run afoul of Section 7 of the GPLv2 which references patents? The interaction between Google's (conditional on not suing Google) patent grant and Section 7 of GPLv2 is not obvious to me.
I actually don't see anything explicitly incompatible with the original GPL, which doesn't mention patent rights at all.
The GPLv2 is not well defined or well structured to deal with these patent-bomb laden areas like video encoding.
As for GPLv3 compatibility - too hard for a non-lawyer to figure out all the potential interactions there. The brain really boggles.
Yes, essentially. The procedure for content at another Google division is explained here. A similar procedure should apply.
In this case, the complaint seems to be primarily a trademark complaint which is probably easily addressed (you can say "Compare to Tetris(R)!" in a game description but you can't call your game "FreeTetris"). And a secondary, very vague claim that because the games are "similar" to the company's game that they use copyrighted material of the company. I don't know whether case law supports that or not, but according to what I've read in a quick Googling it probably doesn't.
According to Wikipedia, this is standard operating procedure for The Tetris Company and they've done the same with Apple's App Store. Not clear that The Tetris Company has ever won a lawsuit on these copyright grounds, but use it to beat small developers up.
Additionally, they pressured a company Biosocia last year via lawsuit to take down their Blockles game. See the statement on the outcome of that (it was settled, not litigated to conclusion - sounds like Biosocia got tired of spending money to fight the lawsuit and just agreed to take the damned game down while stating that they thought that Tetris Company was full of shit).
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The mail app on iPhone sucked balls when it was released and sucks slightly smaller balls now. I owned an iPhone 2G from a few months after release, and I used an iPhone 3G until a month ago. I liked much about the iPhones but always loathed the email app. Chattermail on my old Treo 650 kicked the pants off of it years ago. The lack of IMAP IDLE is an unforgiveable sin and I ditched the whole iPhone platform because there was no way for me to get push email without sharing my IMAP server login with a third party service or switching to Exchange.
Just because it's good enough for grandma and grandpa doesn't mean it's good enough for everybody. The point is on Android you aren't stuck with the mediocre apps the system comes with. You can easily replace basically any part of the system you want.
And I never said Apple rejects lots of apps - I said there are lots of very popular, successful Android apps (not a small list at all - a significant percentage of the most popular Android apps out there) that wouldn't exist or be approved by Apple. Such apps generally don't get developed in the first place either because there is no officially supported way to write them or because developers know Apple will never approve them. The cases we hear about in the press are generally the borderline cases where they thought they'd get approved, but Apple nixed them or where Apple initially approved them then changed their minds.
The old 10.0.45 version of it appears to still be downloadable from here (not sure if there was another version after that).
However, given the rate at which security issues crop up in Flash, you are probably better off using the nspluginwrapper thunking stuff or other method for your distro that makes the 32 bit plugin work on 64 bit Linux, rather than running an out of date Flash plugin.
See my other post where I address this. Yes, that is part of the truth, but it's all related to the openness of the platform - the plethora of inexpensive and high end handsets, the availability of Android on non-AT&T networks, and the ability to run any software you want.
Being able to run the software you want (and I don't just mean stuff that's not in the Market - I agree that Joe Average doesn't directly care about that, though there are peripheral benefits from that openness that he may enjoy) is a big feature of an open platform like Android. The examples I cited in my other post of top-100 Android apps that would be banned on the iPhone platform (Beautiful Widgets, Flash, Handcent SMS, K9mail, Launcher Pro and so on) proves the point that these things do matter to people even if they don't explicitly ever think to themselves "gee, I like Android because it's a more open platform".
Well, I suppose I oversimplified things when I said Android's popularity is in large part because "you can run the apps you want". The reason Android is succeeding is that it's an open ecosystem - it's on lots of different phones, from lots of manufacturers, running on all the different GSM and CDMA networks in the US. There are entry level Android phones for Joe "Cheapskates" Average who just wants apps on a cheap phone, and power-user smartphones like the Evo 4G and Nexus One.
But yeah, actually, if you look at the some of the best and most popular apps people are downloading, a *ton* of them would be banned on the iPhone - again, open ecosystem. LauncherPro? Banned - replaces a key piece of OS functionality. K9mail? Banned - duplicates the official email app. Beautiful Widgets - banned, widgets and behavior modifications to the desktop are disallowed. Handcent SMS? Banned - duplicates the official SMS app. NESoid (and all the emulators) - banned, emulation disallowed. Flash Player - banned, Flash is disallowed. Pandora Radio - exists but sort of sucks because it can't run in the background (well, will probably be able to with iOS 4).
So though I admit there's more to it than just being able to run whatever apps you want, but it's a significant benefit of an open platform and just looking at the apps people seem to download in droves supports this.
I just checked and Google.com still shows a "Change Background Image" link in the lower left corner, so it looks more like it's still an option, they just realized they confused people by defaulting it to on for a few hours.
Anyway, it's just an option now. Nobody's forcing you to use it. I suspect the Slashdot crowd keeps it pretty real on the "give me a plain white background or give me death" tip, but a lot of people like this sort of silly eye candy.
Anybody else remember back when we all switched to using Google *because* of the plain white background and simple layout?
Well, the Android phones have been having quite an impact in the market recently. The big benefit of "being able to run the software you want rather than what Steve Jobs says you can run" seems to speak to people, since that's the major thing Android has going for it that the iPhone doesn't.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but there already is something that works somewhat like what you describe - it's called bankruptcy. In a bankruptcy, the equity shares of a company are generally declared worthless. In some cases, strict priority is violated and a small amount goes to equity holders, but generally they get nothing to speak of.
So if the government fines a company an amount greater than the equity value of the firm, it is highly unlikely that most companies will be able to take on that much incremental debt, and the company will be forced into a bankruptcy filing, the bondholders will be paid back and the excess liquidation value will go to pay the fines, and that's that.
There are of course complicating factors and reasons this doesn't generally happen to large multinational firms (mostly that their large size makes them usually able to shrug off such fines, and that fines are usually proportional to the offense rather than the size of a company). But it's possible in theory.
A complicating issue here is that BP isn't actually a US-based firm, nor is it natively listed on a US stock exchange. It trades through ADRs on NYSE - it is natively listed on the London Stock Exchange, I believe. So... if ADRs are subject to seizure but shares on foreign exchanges aren't, capital just flees to foreign exchanges and nobody wants to list on NYSE and NASDAQ anymore. That wouldn't be a good thing.
Seizure of US-based assets of a firm is at least a more plausible method of punishment. I'm not sure what BP's domestic assets are worth in the US, but it seems like the damage to the company's market value is probably already on par with the value of its US assets. So if you seized them and sold them off to other oil firms as punishment for this, the likely result would just be the remaining foreign assets would be acquired or merged into another company, and those are probably worth something on the order of the $109B market cap left in BP right now, or at least aren't worth much less (that's just a guess based on what I've read about BP's operations).
The net result of all that would be the equity shareholders would probably end up *better off* than they are right now in the event of an asset seizure, or at the least, they wouldn't be much worse off than they are now. Another way of putting it is that the stock market has basically discounted the value of the US assets of BP to nothing already, because if they were spun off, they'd most likely have to be bundled with the huge liability from this oil spill.
Now, let me take issue with one point you made that's just wrong:
The stockholders are supposed to be closely supervising their employees so stuff like this doesn't happen in the first place
No. That's what a Board of Directors is supposed to do. These guys get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in even a moderate sized company to represent the shareholders and supervise the executive team of a company. Joe Shmoe who invests his savings in a mutual fund or buys stock in a bunch of companies can't realistically be expected to know when malfeasance is going on in the corporate offices of a firm. But the Board can and should, at least up to a point.
Sarbannes-Oxley put a lot on the shoulders of the CEO of a publicly traded company in terms of personally certifying accounting and reporting results. There's relatively little out there that holds Boards of Directors responsible for really managing and overseeing the executive team, so this has turned into a bullshit cushy position often held by people who really don't have the interest or knowledge to oversee the executive team of a company. I fully support making Boards of Directors as responsible for overseeing the CEO and executive team as the CEO is supposed to be for overseeing the rest of the firm.
No they have not been punished. The company remains practically unscathed. The notional stock value has not impacted their profits. They're still raking in money hand over fist. At their profit margins the cost of this spill won't make any serious dent. And even if it did, they'll pull an Exxon-Valdez and tie up any judgment in court for so long that they pay a fraction of what they should.
They have spent $1.25B. The market estimates that the total cost to BP of this fiasco will be around $100B. Now, you can argue the market is right or wrong, I personally don't think it will be quite that expensive to clean this mess up, but my point is that BP has accepted responsibility, is shelling out tons of cash, and expects to continue doing so for years to come and the most conservative estimates of that amount still are in the tens of billions of dollars.
The only real "punishment" you can inflict on a corporate entity is costing it cash and this is costing BP dearly. You can't beat its head into the ground, you can't embarrass it, you can't tickle its feet until it cries. Beyond money, which they have already agreed to spend a shit-pot of, if something criminal went on, you have to punish the individuals responsible for the criminal activity. The threat of jail time for negligence with other people's lives is much more effective as a deterrent for individuals engaging in illegal behavior than the any fines/forced reorganization/expropriation of assets on a corporate level will ever be.
Nice rant. I'll only bother with addressing the parts with content.
It's an odd mentality, where the cause-and-effect here wouldn't be the obvious "Executive negligence in their company losing many jobs", but rather "the public caring that the executives cut corners and ignored signs because it would cost time and thus money resulted in this disaster, and subsequent job loss".
I don't know how you got this from what I said. I never suggested that the public caring about the environment is to blame for lost jobs - I said that panicked vacation cancellations are to blame for more damage to local economies than the *actual* damage from the oil spill up to this point. And that a media frenzy contributes to this panic reaction.
Oh, the punishment! Their Q2 and Q3 earnings statements will be less glowing! They may be penalized in the market, until the expected profits return! Please. Call me when they go into the red, even for a single quarter.
Well they already have been penalized by the market. I realize that reflects expected future losses that haven't been realized yet, and that those losses in any given year probably won't be larger than their profits, but what's your point? This all reflects their assumption of a large contingent liability from this mess they created.
You are suggesting by repeatedly using the diminutive phrase "oh noes" that this isn't *real* punishment, but you fail to make clear what you think *real* punishment for a corporate entity is. Expropriation of assets by the Federal government and transfer to a state-owned oil corporation? Forced liquidation of the firm? I put forward the suggestion that these would all fail to create additional deterrence and principally have lots of negative consequences for people that weren't at fault in this incident.
I suggested in the first place that criminal negligence should be fully prosecuted against relevant individuals. I stand by that. Of course, many corporations would love to be able to operate under the corporate veil and never have the individuals involved assume responsibility for criminal behavior, but that doesn't mean we should let them and then run around tearing up corporate stock certificates, wringing our hands in fury, and trying in vain to make a legal fiction pay the price in a moral or retributive sense.
If by "real news" you mean "more media hype" then yes. We get it - the oil spill is an environmental disaster. It's bad for BP, it's really bad for fisherman in the Gulf, and it's generally bad for the economy in all the Gulf states, and it's definitely bad for the marine ecosystem.
BP has already suffered a near crippling blow. They have lost *100 billion* dollars in market cap. The CEO is going to be toast along with quite a few other people as soon as they have the situation calmed down - the board just doesn't want to toast him until things quiet down a bit. The other companies involved, Transocean, Andarko, etc. have suffered proportionally similar blows, accounting for 10s of billions of dollars in additional market cap wiped out.
And the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs in the inevitable restructurings that will come, and those jobs will end up going elsewhere, since we still will be consuming the oil here.
The only worse penalty BP as a corporate organization could pay at this point is a firesale takeover (because their successor will have to eat the huge contingent liability here). If somebody or somebodies at BP were negligent or actively broke safety regulations, then by all means, they should be criminally prosecuted for their actions. Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised. If they did something criminal, they should be prosecuted too.
But this ... obsession ... with personalizing "BP" as some sort of entity that has committed an evil act that we can "punish" in any way further than has already been done is baffling to me. People - it's *been* punished. There are a bunch of marketing and PR weenies on staff at BP and they are just trying to do their jobs here. There's nothing wrong with them promoting the site they put up as a source of information for the public about the oil spill.
What's more, at this point, more economic damage is actually being done by media hype than by oil itself. The damage to the Florida tourism industry isn't being caused by a few tar balls that washed up, it's being caused by panicked morons canceling their vacations because of what they saw on the news. While I'm all for BP and friends covering the costs of actual damage from their oil spill, I don't think it's reasonable to hold anybody other than the media accountable for the damage from their hype machine, and I can't blame BP's PR people for trying to do what they can to get their side of the story out there (as long as they aren't simply lying about it).
But... but... but... he doesn't wear black turtlenecks or sip lattes or sit in coffee shops all day reading Marx. How could he possibly use OS X?
The problem with that argument is these support periods aren't currently transparent at the time of purchase. The net result is that people I know have simply delayed buying an Android phone entirely until things stabilize more. I think the early adopters will just get burned here, some may end up turning away from Android, others will just hopscotch to different manufacturers. But I suspect the ecosystem will stabilize and development will slow down enough that fragmentation won't be such a huge issue before the market is able to "punish" manufacturers who don't support their hardware very much.
Correct, I was going to point that out, but he did say "on a large scale" so he was correct too. The reason for this, I suspect, is that a combination of social/cultural homogeneity and strong community bonds are required to overcome the natural human tendencies toward greed and power-mongering.
Additionally, as another poster suggested, the communities that practice some form of communism on a local level were not formed by the sort of violent revolution of the proletariat that Marx advocated, they peacefully self-segregated from mainstream society. Violent revolution often seems to result in the most violent and cruel gaining power for themselves.
It seems that once you get to some critical size or scale of communities, combined with some critical level of heterogeneity of interests and goals, people revert back to acting in the interest of themselves, their families and their social sub-units. Which makes communism impractical.
Even European-style socialism seems to work best in homogeneous cultures. A country like the US that has so many citizens perceiving each other as "the others" rather than "one of us" inherently seems to have much less social trust between citizens, and that makes it much harder to adopt socialist-style programs.
Agreed on screen changes. But there's a major psychological issue with people shelling out hundreds of dollars for what they perceive as the "latest, greatest" phone, and then 6 months later being told they are stuck on version 1.6 when we've already gone through 2.0, 2.01, 2.1 and are about to see 2.2.
If you think this isn't real, go see the thread on Engadget right now on this topic. People are angry about it. Frankly, I'd be pretty angry if my phone was still running 1.5 (apparently a third of Android phones out there are still stuck on this old-ass version as of a few weeks ago, and a third or so were still on 1.6, with another third on 2.1).
Mind you, almost every phone has at least an *unofficial* community-produced ROM that will get them the 2.1 features and apps. Even the klunky G1 which was the first Android phone can get there - it's just not officially supported, presumably because Google, HTC and T-Mobile don't want to push down an update that replaces the SPL - I guess they think the support costs from doing that would be higher than the PR costs of not doing it.
So yeah, the issue is a bit overdone - or rather, it's not so much fragmentation of hardware specs that's the issue - I think allowing some hardware diversity is a good thing, it encourages innovation. The real issue is lack of hardware support from manufacturers and telcos after the point of sale. Google has up-to-now done basically nothing to force guaranteed support periods and guaranteed maximum release delays on a newly released OS version. I saw nothing in the article to address this.
*That* is the real issue that gets people riled up. *That* is what the users at Engadget are seething over. They want 2.1. They don't want to be told "we can't support 2.1 on your 8 month old handset, eat a dick" by HTC or Sprint or Verizon or whoever. Google is letting the carriers and hardware manufacturers release products, pimp them, then drop support 3 months later. They need to force some structure on customer support - I don't think every piece of hardware should be supported forever, but I think a year of official support for the latest version releases after the last date you sold the product is a minimum, and I think that a 2-3 month lag from Google's release of a new version to an officially supported ROM from the hardware vendor and carrier is a maximum. If a vendor falls outside of those parameters, every handset of their should be banned from the market, effective instantly.
That's the stick they need to support their customers. If Google doesn't man up and do this, I'm afraid it will do a significant amount of harm to the rapidly developing Android market.
Android 2.2 does indeed have a port of the V8 Javascript engine, which is very fast. However, for some reason, Smokescreen doesn't seem to load on my Nexus One (running 2.2 pre-release).
Of course, I have the Flash plugin set to on-demand so I can load Flash if I want to anyway, but I thought it would be cool to see this working on Android. No go for now. :(
Well, the way I read it at first, it doesn't take away your right to sue them, it just says they will no longer promise not to sue you if you sue them first.
But I think I misread the last sentence initially (see my reply here. If the license just terminated the patent grant when a lawsuit was filed, that *would* be GPLv2 compatible. Since it appears that it terminates all rights in that case, it's not currently GPLv2 compatible, though it would be a trivial modification to make it so.
Only if you consider that the last section (cancellation) refers to the rights under the whole license. If the last section just referred to the patent grant, then it wouldn't explicitly forbid you from distributing the software, it would just open you up to countersuit from google.
That's my point.
Upon reading it again, though, it says "then any rights granted to You under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed." - what it probably should say is "then the patent license grant under this section of the License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."
That would preserve GPLv2 compatibility. That was my point.
Like everything else in Android, there are 3rd party apps that allow you to do just that. For example, Flyscreen or MyLock, and Executive Assistant and Lockbot...
All allow customizations to the lock screen, lock screen widgets, or other useful information on the lock screen.
What is the NDK? It's been available for some time now. To the best of my knowledge writing a Dalvik shell to expose the app to the O/S and then using a native NDK core *is* the way to do what you are saying.
These guys ported Quake 3. It uses a lightweight Dalvik launcher to control a native build of Quake 3.
While there might be some utility to a way to write a pure native code user-facing app in C, I don't think it currently exists. Android's browser, for example, is a Dalvik wrapper around the native code. You can of course build a pure native code executable that will run on the terminal (for example, see here) but that's not going to be useful for you.
Have you tried running some apps on a Froyo-enabled Nexus One yet? There can be no doubt, Dalvik is now blazingly fast on a 1GHz snapdragon.
The only performance issues left that I've seen are:
1) For some reason, LauncherPro Beta is far smoother and snappier feeling than the stock Launcher. This was the case in 2.1 and is the case in 2.2. I use LauncherPro Beta, but really there's absolutely no excuse for the stock launcher to not be able to smoothly scroll through the home screens on such blazingly fast hardware. I don't know why the JIT didn't fix this issue with Launcher, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the way it interacts with the graphics hardware on the Nexus One, since the JIT is amazing.
2) Browser scrolling in Android Browser. Not rendering, but scrolling. In terms of page load time and rendering on a good internet connection, this is the fastest phone-based web browser I've seen. But even my iPhone 3G (which has a much less beefy processor) could scroll around on web pages without feeling... choppy. Something is wrong with the smooth scrolling algorithm, the number of frames/the amount of CPU time it uses to actually *scroll* vs. to incrementally render, or the way it puts the Javascript engine on hold or something. Please, please, please figure out how to make the web browser scroll without giving me a headache, the way iPhone does it. Cheat if you need to - skipping frames or a quick-pass and filling in once the primary scroll action is complete. Maintain smoothness at all costs. Since the browser engine is native code (just the outer UI stuff is Dalvik), this saw no benefit from JITing, and in fact is worse under 2.2 in my experience, probably because I came from CyanogenMod which is very well optimized.
If Android gets these two issues kicked, it will be amazing.
What's funny is that the regular (modified) BSD-style license, which grants *no* patent license at all, is considered GPLv2 compatible. How can a license that grants you additional rights on top of the BSD license then be *in*compatible with the GPLv2? The brain boggles...
As soon as you bring up patent grant rights, I guess you potentially run afoul of Section 7 of the GPLv2 which references patents? The interaction between Google's (conditional on not suing Google) patent grant and Section 7 of GPLv2 is not obvious to me.
I actually don't see anything explicitly incompatible with the original GPL, which doesn't mention patent rights at all.
The GPLv2 is not well defined or well structured to deal with these patent-bomb laden areas like video encoding.
As for GPLv3 compatibility - too hard for a non-lawyer to figure out all the potential interactions there. The brain really boggles.
Yes, essentially. The procedure for content at another Google division is explained here. A similar procedure should apply.
In this case, the complaint seems to be primarily a trademark complaint which is probably easily addressed (you can say "Compare to Tetris(R)!" in a game description but you can't call your game "FreeTetris"). And a secondary, very vague claim that because the games are "similar" to the company's game that they use copyrighted material of the company. I don't know whether case law supports that or not, but according to what I've read in a quick Googling it probably doesn't.
According to Wikipedia, this is standard operating procedure for The Tetris Company and they've done the same with Apple's App Store. Not clear that The Tetris Company has ever won a lawsuit on these copyright grounds, but use it to beat small developers up.
Additionally, they pressured a company Biosocia last year via lawsuit to take down their Blockles game. See the statement on the outcome of that (it was settled, not litigated to conclusion - sounds like Biosocia got tired of spending money to fight the lawsuit and just agreed to take the damned game down while stating that they thought that Tetris Company was full of shit).
Apparently, your password is asstastic. Now that's funny.
Yeah, Law sucks. It's just that it's better than the other alternatives we've come up with.
They did sue. The settlement, however, was for a pathetic $8M according to this source.