How do you get around the simple fact that abstinence works 100% every time it is used?
But unlike other forms of contraception, abstinence has a very high chance of failure.
Do you call for the abandonment of the pill and condoms because they fail to work when they are not used
Nope, I call for the use of proven contraceptives because they have a very small chance of failure.
You can keep trying to convince yourself that denying your bodies own desires is the best method of contraception, until the point that you explode in some form from all those repressed desires. In the mean time, I'm going to practice safe sex secure in the knowledge that my form of contraception has less then 0.01% of failure.
Android users will be locked out of content owned by anyone who managed to kick dependence on both Adobe and Microsoft.
Huh?
You know the fees for H.264 are paid by the handset manufacturers and not Google. Android can continue to use H.264 and WebM. In fact someone can write a H.264 codec for Chrome in an extension if they wanted to, Google just want's to kick it's Apple dependency, which is far worse then an MS dependecny, MS only wants my money, Apple wants my money and my obedience.
Google hasn't banned H.264, it's just removed it from the default config. Are you using a platform that gives the manufacturer total control over what you do? If so, I'd be more concerned about getting away from that then what Google is doing.
Address the substance. Flash is pervasive, but distinctly not open. Same with H.264. What's the difference?
Google can distribute Flash without paying a license fee. Adobe wont change that in the near future as it keeps copies of CS selling.
It's about maintaining usability whilst moving towards a more open environment. Only a fool or zealot thinks that can be done overnight. Dropping H.264 is a massive step in the right direction.
This is the point Gruber missed, he couldn't have missed it more if he was facing the completely wrong direction and the point was in another country all together. His questions are either self evident or blatant attacks on google. I'll answer them here.
1. Answered above.
2. The handset makers pay the license fees, not Google. Take that up with Samsung, Motorola and HTC.
3. Already started John.
4. Netflix et al. already use flash. But wait, John wants flash removed. It's as if John were living in a world where Flash did not exist?
5. Pointless really, translates as "Waaaaah, I hate Google"
If you think any of his questions are relevant or insightful you are retarded, especially if you gave any credence to number 5. The fifth "question" was really filler to try and make his list bigger and gain more credence. It's the packing foam of questions that serves no useful purpose.
Google is not in this for the good of humankind, nor is Apple. They're a public company, looking to make a profit.
The two are not mutually exclusive goals. Google has a track record of doing good things with the tech community and people in general. Apple does not, in fact Apple is openly hostile to the community and even it's own customers.
Dismissing the point of view because of the author is pure ad hominem.
Understanding the bias and mindset of the writer is not important? What colour is the sky in your world
Right, Gruber has been on the attack against Android from the word go. Does this not colour how objective his writings are on this subject?
Also nice try to get it marked as ad hominem, but in order for it to be ad hominem it would need to be untrue in this context, which it isn't. You'd have a point if I compared Gruber to Hitler but I didn't (because that would be something Hitler would do).
Thats not really a very good comparison, Australia has one of the lowest population densities on the planet
Considering the size of the flood, isolation of the communities and so forth. The flood affected area is about the size of several European nations, more locally about all of New South Wales and a bit of Victoria.
But we can attribute the low loss of lives to the training of the SES, SES volunteers and local Fire and Emergency services who know exactly what to do in such an emergency. I used to live in an area of Australia that was subject to quite bad bushfires and was in a cyclone zone. When we went to blue alert (cyclone could reach here in 72 hours) the cops went around tying things down that couldn't be moved in doors as well as informing residents of what to do, this was in addition to the ABC (Australian) radio broadcasts.
Australia is a land of extremes, we (as individuals) take natural disasters very seriously. From the day the first flood warnings went out people were stocking up on water, food, batteries and other essentials.
Even Aussie telco's are offering 1 GB plans everywhere. I'm on a rolling month by month contract and I pay A$20 to get 1 GB of downloads put onto my phone. Because usage is metered the evil government says the telco can't dictate how I use the allotment I've paid for. I can tether, download porn, torrents or just use it to buy a nose picker, VHA dont get a word in sideways if they want my 20 bucks.
If I went on a 12 month contract, I'd get 2 GB for the same price (or the same amount for A$10). Metered usage has it's downsides but it gives the perfect opportunity to remove telco controls from what you can do with your internet.
Then maybe they could have crossed the street. Maybe got in a van and driven across town. Called a cell phone company (like ATT for example) and tried to find out the median distance between towers, or the mean connect distance to a cell site, then tested at range. You know, FIELD testing, with some minimal technical muscle behind it.
Maybe they could have just used it in real world conditions, like driving from Infinite Loop to the shops, across town, maybe even to the next state whilst logging the dBm and SNR (they've got root level access, this should be easy seeing as I can do the same on Android without root).
Perhaps they could have just tried holding it like a normal person would.
But then again, this is Apple. Conventional wisdom is thrown out the window so they can "Think Different"*. The external antenna was used there because Jony Ives, Apple's head of Industrial Design fell in love with the look of it. No one is permitted to question that. The antenna's on the earlier Iphones weren't particularly good but at least they worked when held.
* Thinking different limited to thinking what lord Jobs tells you to.
Do the "rest of us" constantly carp that Nvidia IGP graphics are slow,
They are slow, especially since the best dedicated graphics card I can find in most laptops is a Geforce 310M.
I am a gamer but I would like a laptop that can play at least _some_ of my games when I travel for pleasure or business without dragging around a massive, water-cooled chunk of iron and aluminium with a battery life comparable to a goldfishes memory. I'd like a 13 or 14" laptop that weighs under 2.5 KG which is capable of playing something like Fallout NV on it's native screen resolutions (1200x800 or it's 16:9 equivalent), I dont want to run Crysis FFS, but I also don't want it to struggle playing KOTOR.
Sadly enough, I've had a simple drive replacement tied up in meetings and other office politics for months. Write up a proposal for change, sit in meetings where various department heads without a clue discuss the potential hazards, write up the rollback process (for changing a drive?). Your plans are torn apart and put back together. Departmental announcements, customer notifications, etc, etc. Accounting wants numbers, and proposals from 3 sources for the cost of a replacement drive (which you have 5 of in the datacenter, and a regular supplier).
Amen brother.
Good change control is written by sysadmin's. This cuts out the unnecessary bollocks like CAB's (Change Advisory Board) when they aren't needed. The process in ITIL is fine but it's built for every business and in my experience needs to be tailored to your business. In a business of under 100 people, you don't need half of what's in ITIL and it just ends up getting in the way. Even in a business of 500+ you should be able to scale your change management process depending on it's priority and severity, you shouldn't need a damned CAB to get a drive changed, realistically you should be able to get that signed off by at most 3 people (IT manager, Financial Controller and maybe CIO/COO).
Change control is a good thing as I'd be damned if I could remember every thing I did in the last six months but when it's run by project managers who have no idea about the real world of IT it's less useful then an ashtray on a motorbike.
Also, you could try hiring a second sysadmin. One competent enough to understand the systems and can take over if the first sysadmin wins the lotto.
What's that I hear?
But that would cost money, it's cheaper to have one sysadmin do 80 hour weeks and the job of 3 people. Well then stiff bikkies, you get the IT infrastructure you deserve. A good sysadmin loves doco and change control, but if your sysadmin is overloaded then change control will never happen and doco will never be written.
So please, don't blame the sysadmin for bad managerial decisions.
So how long will it be before employers require this testing to screen applicants out for learning disabilities, probabilities of alcoholism/addiction, and probability of getting cancer?
It's called the anti-discrimination act and I'm sincerely sorry your nation hasn't got one.
But seeing as the article is about an Australian company, Australian workers don't need to worry (doubly so seeing as we aren't dependent on our employers for health care, we have one of those evil universal systems)
Then authorize Blackwater (Xe) and Dynacorp to go after these scallywags in exchange for bounties put up by shipping companies.
I gather you know nothing about the Somali pirates or letters of marque.
Letters of marque were issued not because people were enemies but because their ships and cargo were so valuable. Governments issued letters of Marque on pirates and nations they were at war with precisely because building a new ship was so expensive, they could get a privateer to do the dirty work and get a shiny new ship for pennies compared to building one. During times of war this would deprive the enemy of an expensive resource whilst providing one to you.
Now the Somali pirates are using small boats, not worth anything. Further more the pirate leaders are safely hidden away in their land side fortresses. So all you're doing is capturing and killing cheap foot soldiers, which given the poverty Somalia is in would give no short supply of eager recruits for a few USD a day. Any such bounty program will be broke before the week is out.
Pay out $100,000 an ear.
Because someone from Blackwater would never wade ashore, de-ear a few dozen innocent somali's and claim a bounty would they. They're far to moral and upstanding to stoop to that aren't they.
Greece's debt got to 110% of it's GDP before the crap hit the fan and Greece had no real industry to speak of (they relied a lot on tourism which dried up in the GFC).
Now what matters is, does the US have a plan to pay it all back. After WWII the European nations had a plan to repay their WWII debts, it took the UK over 60 years and some are still repaying them.
One of the reasons Australia is doing so well is that our debt is less then 5% of our GDP which is below the 30 yr average. But then again we didn't let our banks run amok either, nor did we start two wars AND lower taxes, nor artificially deflate the interest rate to encourage reckless borrowing. It seems the US has a lot of problems and no one wants to make the hard decisions (raise tax and institute austerity measures, it's the only proven way to get out of this mess).
It displays no grasp of logic whatsoever. Criminals will always have guns. Those of us who don't want to be their victims, carry them for self-defense.
Hi, this is bollocks.
The way to defeat this is simple, to make gun control restrictive enough that criminals cannot source guns legally and to make the laws lax enough that the demand for a black market in firearms is unprofitable and therefore beyond the budget of your average criminal.
This is exactly what happened in Australia, the Asian and Lebanese gangs have to fight with knives which cant do a great deal of crowd damage, in fact it's very hard to do permanent damage to your opponent even if you get the jump on him. So I dont worry about gangs.
We have the odd armed robbery but shootings, fatal or otherwise are such rare occurrences that if it happens to anyone, it's considered nationwide news. Now only organised criminals in AU have guns, these are predominantly our biker gangs or "bikies" who typically run drugs. The brilliant part is that if I have nothing to do with a bikie, I have no fear of being shot or threatened by one.
I'm really sorry you live in a place that requires you to carry a gun to feel safe, I feel perfectly safe anywhere in my nation armed with fist, foot and common sense.
Another funny thing. We actually have more guns per capita than the US has. And yet we have very few shootings.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Sweden have national service.
Perhaps this has a part to play in how Swede's handle guns, then again Walt Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald were both military men.
Your point demonstrates that the problem with the US is not the existence of guns but rather the attitude towards them. The Swede's I know love shooting but are reluctant to do it outside of approved area's (ranges, hunting grounds), Swedes (in my opinion) dont view guns as a possible solution to their problems so they go about fixing them in other ways. Americans I dont believe think like this, rather some of them view firearms as a solution to a perspective problem.
In Australia, it's not hard to get guns, in fact it's easier to get my firearms license then my drivers license (but then again, guns kill less than 10 people in my state, motor vehicle accidents kill almost 300 yearly) but still they are hardly ever used in a crime. Those predisposed to random acts of violence (read: gangs) tend not to have firearms as the licensing route is denied to them and not enough of a black market exists to allow cheap guns to enter the country (as the licensing route is hardly ever denied to people). Aside from the odd armed robbery, I dont need to worry about crim's with guns as the only ones with a few guns are the organised kind (read: bikies) and as long as I dont get involved in their business I have nothing to fear.
The point to this rant is that Americans need to change their attitude on guns or it's going to turn around to bite you. Owning guns can be very dangerous, you need a little bit of responsibility with it and if you cant be responsible you need your guns taken away. Licensing would be a huge step in the right direction because just like with motor vehicles it shows you know how to operate one safely and understand all the rules regarding their use.
A free OS with expectation of pumping us full of ads.
I dont know where you got this expectation from. You've clearly never used Android.
I've been an Android user since May 2009 so I've had quite a bit of experience with the OS and not once have I had an advertisement foisted on me, let alone pumped full of them. Ad's are only displayed in an application if the developer chooses to do so. This can have negative effects, when Astro File Manager adopted ad's, I switched to EStrong. As it stands only 3 out of the 25 odd applications on my Motorola Milestone have ad's and these take up about 1/8 of the screen.
Once iPhone comes to Verizon (likely the announcement is Tuesday and release February), the iPhone will again rise to the top.
Funny,
They've been saying "this coming Thursday" for the better part of 3 years now. This also ignores the exclusivity agreement between AT&T and Apple that doesn't expire until mid 2012
It'll be interesting to see what the Verizon iPhone does for iOS.
This old chestnut.
I doubt it will ever exist, AT&T has an exclusivity contract with Apple until July 2012, so thats Iphone 6 territory and you can be certain that AT&T will sue the living daylights out of Apple if they decide to break the contract.
So the question for the great and mythical Verizon Iphone is what will Android be doing in 2012? Will Verizon even care by that point?
But as someone who is living in a country that has no exclusivity agreement I doubt that it would make one iota of difference. Everyone has the Iphone, but no-one is willing to ignore Android. In fact you can hardly see Iphone ad's on shop windows any more, Hell Vodafone has "Android Inside" stickers plastered everywhere. When Hellstra bought out the HTC Desire earlier this year there was a lot of demand awakened for Android. Every telco woke up and took notice, trying to get exclusivity agreements on new devices. Optarse got a 2 month exclusivity on the Samsung Galaxy S, Vodashaft on the HTC Desire HD.
So, would telco's even care. I'm certain Verizon is making a lot of money with their Droid line up and not having to pander to a petulant manufacturer.
It is telling to note, that both Android and iPhone are growing market share at the expense of Blackberry and others, rather than at the expense of each other.
It's also telling to note that Android is still growing whilst Iphone is stagnating.
Android +6.4%
Iphone +0.8%
So the Iphone only just managed to grow beyond Palms 0.7% loss in share. RIM and Microsoft lost 4.1% and 1.8% respectively. This was in August, the Iphone4 rush was still ongoing but some reports suggested that 4 out of every 5 Iphone4's sold replaced an older model Iphone.
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed that for you.
OK, the last part is just wishful thinking but admit it yanks, you want it too.
But unlike other forms of contraception, abstinence has a very high chance of failure.
Nope, I call for the use of proven contraceptives because they have a very small chance of failure.
You can keep trying to convince yourself that denying your bodies own desires is the best method of contraception, until the point that you explode in some form from all those repressed desires. In the mean time, I'm going to practice safe sex secure in the knowledge that my form of contraception has less then 0.01% of failure.
Huh?
You know the fees for H.264 are paid by the handset manufacturers and not Google. Android can continue to use H.264 and WebM. In fact someone can write a H.264 codec for Chrome in an extension if they wanted to, Google just want's to kick it's Apple dependency, which is far worse then an MS dependecny, MS only wants my money, Apple wants my money and my obedience.
Google hasn't banned H.264, it's just removed it from the default config. Are you using a platform that gives the manufacturer total control over what you do? If so, I'd be more concerned about getting away from that then what Google is doing.
Google can distribute Flash without paying a license fee. Adobe wont change that in the near future as it keeps copies of CS selling.
It's about maintaining usability whilst moving towards a more open environment. Only a fool or zealot thinks that can be done overnight. Dropping H.264 is a massive step in the right direction.
This is the point Gruber missed, he couldn't have missed it more if he was facing the completely wrong direction and the point was in another country all together. His questions are either self evident or blatant attacks on google. I'll answer them here.
1. Answered above.
2. The handset makers pay the license fees, not Google. Take that up with Samsung, Motorola and HTC.
3. Already started John.
4. Netflix et al. already use flash. But wait, John wants flash removed. It's as if John were living in a world where Flash did not exist?
5. Pointless really, translates as "Waaaaah, I hate Google"
If you think any of his questions are relevant or insightful you are retarded, especially if you gave any credence to number 5. The fifth "question" was really filler to try and make his list bigger and gain more credence. It's the packing foam of questions that serves no useful purpose.
The two are not mutually exclusive goals. Google has a track record of doing good things with the tech community and people in general. Apple does not, in fact Apple is openly hostile to the community and even it's own customers.
Understanding the bias and mindset of the writer is not important? What colour is the sky in your world
Right, Gruber has been on the attack against Android from the word go. Does this not colour how objective his writings are on this subject?
Also nice try to get it marked as ad hominem, but in order for it to be ad hominem it would need to be untrue in this context, which it isn't. You'd have a point if I compared Gruber to Hitler but I didn't (because that would be something Hitler would do).
You mean John Gruber the Mac fanboy who's too much of a zealot for other fanboys has an issue with a Google product.
Colour me unsurprised (and unconvinced).
Considering the size of the flood, isolation of the communities and so forth. The flood affected area is about the size of several European nations, more locally about all of New South Wales and a bit of Victoria.
But we can attribute the low loss of lives to the training of the SES, SES volunteers and local Fire and Emergency services who know exactly what to do in such an emergency. I used to live in an area of Australia that was subject to quite bad bushfires and was in a cyclone zone. When we went to blue alert (cyclone could reach here in 72 hours) the cops went around tying things down that couldn't be moved in doors as well as informing residents of what to do, this was in addition to the ABC (Australian) radio broadcasts.
Australia is a land of extremes, we (as individuals) take natural disasters very seriously. From the day the first flood warnings went out people were stocking up on water, food, batteries and other essentials.
Go easy on him, he's clearly a very confused individual.
Even Aussie telco's are offering 1 GB plans everywhere. I'm on a rolling month by month contract and I pay A$20 to get 1 GB of downloads put onto my phone. Because usage is metered the evil government says the telco can't dictate how I use the allotment I've paid for. I can tether, download porn, torrents or just use it to buy a nose picker, VHA dont get a word in sideways if they want my 20 bucks.
If I went on a 12 month contract, I'd get 2 GB for the same price (or the same amount for A$10). Metered usage has it's downsides but it gives the perfect opportunity to remove telco controls from what you can do with your internet.
Download at home my arse.
Maybe they could have just used it in real world conditions, like driving from Infinite Loop to the shops, across town, maybe even to the next state whilst logging the dBm and SNR (they've got root level access, this should be easy seeing as I can do the same on Android without root).
Perhaps they could have just tried holding it like a normal person would.
But then again, this is Apple. Conventional wisdom is thrown out the window so they can "Think Different"*. The external antenna was used there because Jony Ives, Apple's head of Industrial Design fell in love with the look of it. No one is permitted to question that. The antenna's on the earlier Iphones weren't particularly good but at least they worked when held.
* Thinking different limited to thinking what lord Jobs tells you to.
To me, Abandonware is a game I cannot legally source. Ergo, cannot possibly be a source of revenue for the license holders.
I suppose a more legal definition is a license who's holders no longer exist or have no interest in enforcing.
They are slow, especially since the best dedicated graphics card I can find in most laptops is a Geforce 310M.
I am a gamer but I would like a laptop that can play at least _some_ of my games when I travel for pleasure or business without dragging around a massive, water-cooled chunk of iron and aluminium with a battery life comparable to a goldfishes memory. I'd like a 13 or 14" laptop that weighs under 2.5 KG which is capable of playing something like Fallout NV on it's native screen resolutions (1200x800 or it's 16:9 equivalent), I dont want to run Crysis FFS, but I also don't want it to struggle playing KOTOR.
Amen brother.
Good change control is written by sysadmin's. This cuts out the unnecessary bollocks like CAB's (Change Advisory Board) when they aren't needed. The process in ITIL is fine but it's built for every business and in my experience needs to be tailored to your business. In a business of under 100 people, you don't need half of what's in ITIL and it just ends up getting in the way. Even in a business of 500+ you should be able to scale your change management process depending on it's priority and severity, you shouldn't need a damned CAB to get a drive changed, realistically you should be able to get that signed off by at most 3 people (IT manager, Financial Controller and maybe CIO/COO).
Change control is a good thing as I'd be damned if I could remember every thing I did in the last six months but when it's run by project managers who have no idea about the real world of IT it's less useful then an ashtray on a motorbike.
Also, you could try hiring a second sysadmin. One competent enough to understand the systems and can take over if the first sysadmin wins the lotto.
What's that I hear?
But that would cost money, it's cheaper to have one sysadmin do 80 hour weeks and the job of 3 people. Well then stiff bikkies, you get the IT infrastructure you deserve. A good sysadmin loves doco and change control, but if your sysadmin is overloaded then change control will never happen and doco will never be written.
So please, don't blame the sysadmin for bad managerial decisions.
Thai's have been eating insects for some time.
I think if there were wide spread negative effects they would have been discovered there by now.
Still, one of the things I wont eat in Thailand, some Thai girls love them.
Oh, very well then,
On behalf of the commonwealth of Australia I accept your surrender.
It's called the anti-discrimination act and I'm sincerely sorry your nation hasn't got one.
But seeing as the article is about an Australian company, Australian workers don't need to worry (doubly so seeing as we aren't dependent on our employers for health care, we have one of those evil universal systems)
I gather you know nothing about the Somali pirates or letters of marque.
Letters of marque were issued not because people were enemies but because their ships and cargo were so valuable. Governments issued letters of Marque on pirates and nations they were at war with precisely because building a new ship was so expensive, they could get a privateer to do the dirty work and get a shiny new ship for pennies compared to building one. During times of war this would deprive the enemy of an expensive resource whilst providing one to you.
Now the Somali pirates are using small boats, not worth anything. Further more the pirate leaders are safely hidden away in their land side fortresses. So all you're doing is capturing and killing cheap foot soldiers, which given the poverty Somalia is in would give no short supply of eager recruits for a few USD a day. Any such bounty program will be broke before the week is out.
Because someone from Blackwater would never wade ashore, de-ear a few dozen innocent somali's and claim a bounty would they. They're far to moral and upstanding to stoop to that aren't they.
You didn't think this through very well did you
Greece's debt got to 110% of it's GDP before the crap hit the fan and Greece had no real industry to speak of (they relied a lot on tourism which dried up in the GFC).
Now what matters is, does the US have a plan to pay it all back. After WWII the European nations had a plan to repay their WWII debts, it took the UK over 60 years and some are still repaying them.
One of the reasons Australia is doing so well is that our debt is less then 5% of our GDP which is below the 30 yr average. But then again we didn't let our banks run amok either, nor did we start two wars AND lower taxes, nor artificially deflate the interest rate to encourage reckless borrowing. It seems the US has a lot of problems and no one wants to make the hard decisions (raise tax and institute austerity measures, it's the only proven way to get out of this mess).
The problem with that is after you've invaded France, it's still France.
Hi, this is bollocks.
The way to defeat this is simple, to make gun control restrictive enough that criminals cannot source guns legally and to make the laws lax enough that the demand for a black market in firearms is unprofitable and therefore beyond the budget of your average criminal.
This is exactly what happened in Australia, the Asian and Lebanese gangs have to fight with knives which cant do a great deal of crowd damage, in fact it's very hard to do permanent damage to your opponent even if you get the jump on him. So I dont worry about gangs.
We have the odd armed robbery but shootings, fatal or otherwise are such rare occurrences that if it happens to anyone, it's considered nationwide news. Now only organised criminals in AU have guns, these are predominantly our biker gangs or "bikies" who typically run drugs. The brilliant part is that if I have nothing to do with a bikie, I have no fear of being shot or threatened by one.
I'm really sorry you live in a place that requires you to carry a gun to feel safe, I feel perfectly safe anywhere in my nation armed with fist, foot and common sense.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Sweden have national service.
Perhaps this has a part to play in how Swede's handle guns, then again Walt Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald were both military men.
Your point demonstrates that the problem with the US is not the existence of guns but rather the attitude towards them. The Swede's I know love shooting but are reluctant to do it outside of approved area's (ranges, hunting grounds), Swedes (in my opinion) dont view guns as a possible solution to their problems so they go about fixing them in other ways. Americans I dont believe think like this, rather some of them view firearms as a solution to a perspective problem.
In Australia, it's not hard to get guns, in fact it's easier to get my firearms license then my drivers license (but then again, guns kill less than 10 people in my state, motor vehicle accidents kill almost 300 yearly) but still they are hardly ever used in a crime. Those predisposed to random acts of violence (read: gangs) tend not to have firearms as the licensing route is denied to them and not enough of a black market exists to allow cheap guns to enter the country (as the licensing route is hardly ever denied to people). Aside from the odd armed robbery, I dont need to worry about crim's with guns as the only ones with a few guns are the organised kind (read: bikies) and as long as I dont get involved in their business I have nothing to fear.
The point to this rant is that Americans need to change their attitude on guns or it's going to turn around to bite you. Owning guns can be very dangerous, you need a little bit of responsibility with it and if you cant be responsible you need your guns taken away. Licensing would be a huge step in the right direction because just like with motor vehicles it shows you know how to operate one safely and understand all the rules regarding their use.
I dont know where you got this expectation from. You've clearly never used Android.
I've been an Android user since May 2009 so I've had quite a bit of experience with the OS and not once have I had an advertisement foisted on me, let alone pumped full of them. Ad's are only displayed in an application if the developer chooses to do so. This can have negative effects, when Astro File Manager adopted ad's, I switched to EStrong. As it stands only 3 out of the 25 odd applications on my Motorola Milestone have ad's and these take up about 1/8 of the screen.
So... not pumped full of ads.
Funny,
They've been saying "this coming Thursday" for the better part of 3 years now. This also ignores the exclusivity agreement between AT&T and Apple that doesn't expire until mid 2012
This old chestnut.
I doubt it will ever exist, AT&T has an exclusivity contract with Apple until July 2012, so thats Iphone 6 territory and you can be certain that AT&T will sue the living daylights out of Apple if they decide to break the contract.
So the question for the great and mythical Verizon Iphone is what will Android be doing in 2012? Will Verizon even care by that point?
But as someone who is living in a country that has no exclusivity agreement I doubt that it would make one iota of difference. Everyone has the Iphone, but no-one is willing to ignore Android. In fact you can hardly see Iphone ad's on shop windows any more, Hell Vodafone has "Android Inside" stickers plastered everywhere. When Hellstra bought out the HTC Desire earlier this year there was a lot of demand awakened for Android. Every telco woke up and took notice, trying to get exclusivity agreements on new devices. Optarse got a 2 month exclusivity on the Samsung Galaxy S, Vodashaft on the HTC Desire HD.
So, would telco's even care. I'm certain Verizon is making a lot of money with their Droid line up and not having to pander to a petulant manufacturer.
It's also telling to note that Android is still growing whilst Iphone is stagnating.
Android +6.4%
Iphone +0.8%
So the Iphone only just managed to grow beyond Palms 0.7% loss in share. RIM and Microsoft lost 4.1% and 1.8% respectively. This was in August, the Iphone4 rush was still ongoing but some reports suggested that 4 out of every 5 Iphone4's sold replaced an older model Iphone.
What happens if these rates are maintained?