More likely customers from places with privacy laws will start to offer their business to non-US providers.
Notice that the planned Indian regulations will probably make it a "safe 3rd party country" in EU-speak, meaning that personal data can be freely transfered out of the EU to India for processing or whatever because it has a similar level of legal privacy protection. Notice that the same thing EU-US is currently possible only with massive winking, and can end over night e.g. if the EU parliament gets pissed of enough about it.
Notice how the EU directive is already forcing ad networks to change how they operate (slightly I admit, but then that's what they are doing voluntary to avoid explicit regulations/fines for their practices).
One last thought here is that everyone needs to be able to show proof that he is legally using MS Office. And in big organizations licenses (although they might have MS site licenses) are a headache. How come that they cannot put a similar amount of energy into keeping track how they come to have my data?
Well, look at it like this, when such laws become standard around the globe, and for example the EU decides to reject the US-EU data safe heaven idiocy, US businesses will overload the phone system in DC to get such laws in the US too, because more and more revenue will be lost, because it will be simply illegal to use an US provider to do anything related with personal data. Until this happens I guess nothing will happen in the US on this front.
Well, while it seems to have superficial differences the Indian law (as described here) is rather similar to the EU data protection directive.
Tiny issues include:
- the form of the consent. One has to see how that is being handled, but consent to handle personal information is required in the EU too.
- some issues are also around what is a person-linked information. IPv4 addresses are ruled sometimes so, sometimes not. IPv6 addresses almost for sure will be person-linked. Did I mention that in practice Apache's default configuration is illegal? Notice how the EU has forced most (even US-based) ad networks to work around that by at least masking the last byte of the address.
- The right to know what a company stores about you, where it got that information from, and to correct wrong entries is rather natural. Depending upon where you ask in the EU data protection is considered either law, constitutional law, or a basic human right.
- The only thing that has made this in the past "easier to ignore" is that the EU considers US companies that pledge to keep their laws to be legal targets of at least some personal information. (Notice that EC2 expanded first with data centers into the EU, because of data protection laws in the EU).
- Notice that gmail/gapps are illegal to use (at least businesses) in a good part of the globe. E.g. even Canadian entities have decided not to use Google's offerings because of Canadian privacy laws. Basically the US approach of NO privacy (or actually privacy only in some niches, like HIPAA) is costing US business revenue. It will only get worse with time.
Sorry, you misunderstood the concept of LTS distributions. One feature of them is that everything (and that means app versions) stays the same, so if you can some scripts to deploy it, it will just work. No new version of FooBar, that needs a new foobar.conf will pop up. Actually in some scenarios, even fidelity at the UI level is a requirement. (Be it for legal reasons, or because of users that learn to do certain procedures without understanding it deeply, my worst case was "move the mouse 2cm to the right, 1cm down, left-click,...." kind of user.)
The funny part is, that medical doctors in wide parts of Europe use non-SI units, e.g. blood pressure is measured in mmHg (which is the rise of one mm [that's the SI part *g*] of Quicksilver),...
Well, as it happens we use probably half the time before tube the PS3 to stream from our PCs upnpservers. The rest are mostly shows recorded by the cable settop box, watching "live" TV has got to the point where it's the exception.
We probably could survive without the cable settop box, but then it's free (triple play, phone, premium tv and 100mbit internet costs practically the same as 100mbit internet alone (it's something like 69.90 versus 70.00)).
Guess it's even more feasible in the US where services like hulu allow you to watch TV via Internet wholly legally,...
Or the country that does not want to accept the International War Crime Tribunal, because their Armed Forces routinely commit violations of International Law?
Or the country that considers it absolutely okay, to try to kill it's enemies with remote drones, accepting quite a bit of civilian collateral damage. (Hmmm, you sure that the world trade center might not have contained at least one bad guy. Sorry for the collateral civilian damage. Please consider that the stronger party has way less right to overdo "self-defense" than a weak party.)
Or the country that considers due process irrelevant when it comes to really important things like copyright infringement (and no that is not theft).
Ever wondered how many innocent people are not allowed to fly, because they happen to share the name with somebody that might be a terrorist?
You do realize the US has laws on the books after 9/11 that allows to arrest a person, keep her/him for an indefinite time period locked up and without communication, without due process.
Again, the FBI is also allowed basically to get any information on citizens, including a gag order that makes it so that the public never realizes the overall quantity of such requests, just by a FBI agent certifying that the situation matches a broad spectrum of situations.
Then we've got the Guantanamo Bay thing, which is just a symptom of the greater issue. The US government breaks it's own laws and if it does not so, it cooperates with regimes that can routinely do what the US would like to do and just happens to transport the prisoner to that country. Nixon had to go over the idea that he is above the law
As I pointed out earlier, the whole SWIFT treaty is problematic. The US pays lip-service to European standards, but in practice they just ignore them. And the EU/national authorities in Europe allow that to happen.
The article is primarily about the German national authorities not knowing what to do with a totally reasonable request as outlined in the SWIFT treaty. Now it's arguably the US to be faulted for not providing procedures to fulfill their obligations or if the European authorities should be faulted for not inquiring about these procedures when the treaty went operational. I probably know why the German authorities had no idea (because the treaty was passed at the EU level and such information takes time to sicker to national institutions that might be involved in handling them) and I probably know why the US authorities did what they did (the whole concept of privacy is really alien to them, might as well require them to process requests in all official EU languages:-P)
Well, the problem is that the US meddles in our politics.
The article mentioned is an example. Privacy requirements (which go by the fine name of data protection directive[EU]/law[countries] btw), are in most European countries a constitutional (sometimes even explicit I think, most often interpreted by supreme courts) civil right. The EU data protection directive reflects this importance.
The US agreed basically to provide for the European citizens civil right "protection of personal data". Now one of our MEP (Member European Parliament). What he found out:
-) the German authorities have not prepared for this case. -) The US has browbeat the EU to rubberstamp all data requests without even inquiring what they are for? (Can anyone say "economic espionage"?) -) The US seems to have forgotten to provide "business processes" (as in a "printed form" or a "website" where inquiries might have been sent.)
So if we want to distribute minus points, two for the US (by not following procedures for data inquiries [these miss the explanation for what the data will be used], and by not even providing a way to fulfill it's obligations [which is kind of not surprising, as the US has a completely different point of view on data keeping, basically citizens have practically no rights, the government can do what it want]), and 2 minus points to European/member state authorities (for letting inquiries go forward that do not explain why they are needed, and for not preparing for citizen inquiries).
I know this sounds strange to the Americans, but the EU has privacy regulations that make processing of data that can be linked to a specific person very HIPAA-ish. (e.g. anyone that processes such data in the private sector needs to offer a service where a person can ask for a report what is stored on them (that's what the MEP in the article basically tried to do), and offer deletion (if there is no legal justification to keeping it)/modification (if the data is wrong). Government entities are basically only allowed to do data processing if they are authorized to do so by law.)
After the shocking news that the US government does not honoring a treaty (actually they do half-honor it, they take what the other side offers, but they do not live up to their own side of it), I've got even more shocking news, the sun raises usually somewhere in the east, and sets in the west, I'm almost sure.
And yes, some of the nicest people that I know are Americans. And the US government does not just shit on their international partners, they have also this tendency to shit on their own population. Many slogans about the US being a free, with guaranteed civil rights, law abiding democracy, are nowadays just that, slogans. About as much related to reality as an advertisement for breakfast cereals suggesting them to be healthy and helping you to keep your weight,...
Gag orders, punishments without judicial review (e.g. domains seizures, keeping a "terrorist" [defined as anyone without power that the local DHS flunky dislikes enough] locked up for extended periods), no rule of law (noticed how entertainment companies don't pay 6 figures per infringed song when they do it? Notice how the government tends to ignore the parts of the constitution and laws it dislikes? (E.g. noticed how the commerce clause is abused to allow the federal government to extend their ability to govern practically anything?)
You do realize that the hardware guidelines what is allowed and what not, for WP7 phones is so narrow that we've seen the whole range of "innovation" already?
I'd argue that with Android they'd be able to at least put a Nokia branded UI and other enhancement into it. E.g. they'd be allowed to support Qt on Android (alternative execution environments are allowed, as long they follow the Android security model)
With MS, they are not even allowed to keep Qt which is technically a rather sound cross platform environment. So anybody that has been listening to Nokia's roadmap the last years, is now assessing the bloddy spot on their back,...
Intel hears about it from the press. Well, with such friends you don't need enemies. Wonder what the new CEO does to enemies, if he treats his partners like that? Send extermination squads?
Basically, Nokia just managed to commit suicide. They managed to piss off the developers, industry partners, customers, and what for? A phone monoculture with such strict hardware guidelines, that all WP7 phones look quite similar. And as some reviewers have commented, the current WP7 hardware guidelines are quite nice, well, compared to Androids from two years ago;)
So a company that is still big, but shrinking in relevance, bets on the weakest option, which forces it to back-stab it's own partners, and which gives it only tiny leeway to compete?
Guess you use public transport too, I mean they do it better.
Hint: better has an implied parameter of the half order used to sort the alternatives. Actually humans are so defective that they use anything resembling a half order sometimes, but that's another story.
So if you definition of better involves "better for the environment" (hint: that's again a better, and you can figure out what is "better" for the environment), being able to read/work/nap, the price (it's usually lower than the real costs of driving, hint: you need to consider capital costs, service costs, and so on and not only the cheapest part, gas), than public transport is really better.
Now if better for you is to be free of a schedule, to be able to travel to any reasonable point more or less directly, have some privacy while traveling,... than you'll probably consider a car to be better than public transport.
Now applied to mail handling, it's easy to see that there are similar trade offs here. Google is the "standardized public transport", that is more reliable, non-tiring to the user solution. But if you need to do custom stuff, react to say SMTP envelopes, run a mail based incident response system, run a mailing list, than running it via Google's IMAP/SMTP services might be less than perfect. (Some software might be setup to use POP3/IMAP/SMTP, but others might want to be installed into the mail server more intimately.)
Sorry, somebody else posted 2 millions as a reliable number, LOL. Anyway, guess that means slightly over 6 billion do care? Wow, logic for retards.
I mean, how do you know how many iToys there are? Not even Apple wants you to know, and worse, they even make reverse engineering the serial no via statistical methods hard.
Btw, did somebody mention, that on the smartphone market, Android has outgrown all other actors? How can Apple even try to compete in the long run, especially as it obviously does not cater to some segments (e.g. the ones that care about controlling their own devices, people that want to use most websites (e.g. Flash, as somebody managed to survey the situation, 10 of 10 websites of the top 10 brands require Flash unconditionally),...
So basically, as with the iPhone Apple will loose the Tablet space the same way, just by the numbers. As some economists have found out, Google has unleashed a monster with Android, but they focused on how Google will not necessarily profit from that. Guess what they've forgot is that Google already profits from avoiding a vendor-lock-in to some other vendor, so even if the "mobile OS" is a free commodity, it's a strategic gain for Google.
Yet somehow Apple managed to clean house in the market on their first try. I doubt anyone learned any lessons other than not to run a desktop OS on the tablet. Hell, they even had the iPad itself to look at for inspiration, and still failed to come out with a compelling alternative.
Hardly. Apple release a sized up iPhone, that is not very esthetic (but that's on the eyes of beholder, I'm just going by the spontaneous reaction of my 10yrs old daughter, ugly sized up iPhone, when she saw it the first time), with a nonfunctional OS (The stupid thing was single tasking at the UI level, that's so 1980s), non ergonomic (the iPad is rather heavy for it's puny functionality), fixed battery which makes extending the runtime outside a PITA,...
No Apple just managed to ride it through on their brand, but will get them only to some point.
What? "Turned a profit" is notable praise? Archos a successful tablet maker? Galaxy Tab sold well? With a small return rate? WTF?
Well, numbers are very suspect here, Apple does not release numbers, nobody really does. Fact is when I walked through a local mall before christmas, basically every relevant shop had iPads in stock and advertised them. My Archos, my wife had to hunt down on Amazon, and the delivery Amazon got was gone in less than 24 hours. All local shops listed them out of stock, will be replenished in 4-6 weeks.
Now that proves nothing, but it suggests that vendors overestimated demand for the iPad, and underestimated the demand for Archos tablets.
22% was based on the deliberately misleading numbers put forth by Samsung. And even with those completely false numbers, that puts Apple at 78% (and much higher with the actual numbers).
So where do your reliable numbers for shipped and sold iPads come from? I mean, NOBODY publishes them. Apple does not even split out the bilance numbers by unit. So WHERE do you get these reliable numbers? My observation, outside the US, which is a special case anyway, having lived in the communication stone age for a long time, the iPad has been quite in stock
Why would they be a fad? Because people bought too many iPads and not enough Android tablets?
Actually, I don't think it will be a fad, it's more or less a question of what dimension will prove out to be most practicable. I've got at home (not for me, but if I add up all family members), tablets/mobiles ranging from 10.1"-3.5" displays, running Android, Maemo, iOS, and I have to admit that the 10" display is nicer for reading than my 3.5" Nokia. OTOH, it's slightly less portable, and for long stays outside, you need some case to carry it, you cannot put it into your jacket. Furthermore, I personally consider any onscreen keyboard a very inferior alternative to a real keyboard.
Funny, on my 1024x660 10,1" Archos tablet, the builtin apps look quite nicely scaled. Even Non-Archos apps e.g. Google Market which is available only inofficially for the Archos look perfectly scaled and fine.
This might be because Android, since Version 1.0 (which did not support different screensizes or big screens at all) has been using a descriptive layout UI, which means, that all apps that do not abuse that (basically emulating x/y positioning and abusing the tools in the process), scale sensibly to a bigger screen. Probably not perfectly, and in cases it might make more sense to add additional UI elements instead of scaling existing ones.
Btw, the only thing that does not "scale" to the Tablet format in practice are ads. Ads that would be bothersome on a 3.2" 320x480 screen are hard to notice on a 10.1" 1024x600 screen:)
Considering that the browser can be used to install "offline-useable" webapps, and somewhere in the web there might be a page that links such offline capable apps (the main villain here seems to be a small Californian company by the name of Google???), so the browser is clearly in the business of providing an alternate market place, right?
(Actually, postulating that there are more than one such page, I guess it's a case of an emergency, pull the browser, it can introduce multiple alternate market places, plus these can use alternate payment methods,...)
So will Google be remote-destructing all instances of webbrowsers with support for Google GEARS, HTML5 or similar on Android devices?
Considering that OP asks for ssh, one might assume that he is from the Unix/Linux space, hence a Nokia N900 that is the ultimate hacker friendly phone makes sense.
The biggest issue I've found with the keyoard that you need Fn to enter digits, and the dot is Fn-less hence, entering IP addresses needs some getting used to.
Basically you are getting a ARM based Linux subsubsub notebook, with a X11 based UI that is appropiate for the size. And the form factor makes it a nice phone too.
Drawbacks:
-) the usual battery drain problem (basically if you are a power user you probably want to have a second charged pack at hand, a fully charged battery can be drained in 3 hours if you use it nonstop) -) some stuff like MMS (who is willing to pay for that?) need 3rd party apps. Other nice stuff like a Wifi hotspot or Bluetooth tethering need to be installed from extras-devel. -) default kernel comes without iptables, sigh.
Other goodies:
-) Firefox based default browser. -) Very well done Skype integration. -) The phone works well as an UMTS modem over USB (if you need to tether on the road for your laptop). -) Terminal app, and trivial root access, hence you can play completely e.g. with the network stack as you need it. (My home setup is: N900 tethered via USB to my desktop, accessing the Internet via the desktop, with a VNC client on the desktop to control the N900. If the cable modem fails, the N900 still accesses the Internet via the desktop, but the desktop uses the N900 as it's fallback UMTS modem)
Well, actually comparing US to EU employers (loosely spoken, as I always work as a contractor, so I've got basically no legal rights anywhere anyway), US employers tend to care about their "employees" way more than European ones. Guess that might not apply to somebody easily replaceable, and n=1 is a slight small probe for statistics.
Furthermore, I'd not call the US free of workplace rules, it's just that beyond the federal one, many states have their own regulations on top. Btw, it's quite similar to the EU, where there might be EU directives specifying standards, but the actual laws are enacted by the member countries. That's why in many areas most countries in the EU have their own laws that tend to be aweful similar to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely customers from places with privacy laws will start to offer their business to non-US providers.
Notice that the planned Indian regulations will probably make it a "safe 3rd party country" in EU-speak, meaning that personal data can be freely transfered out of the EU to India for processing or whatever because it has a similar level of legal privacy protection. Notice that the same thing EU-US is currently possible only with massive winking, and can end over night e.g. if the EU parliament gets pissed of enough about it.
Or where a disgruntled employee has a bad day.
Notice how the EU directive is already forcing ad networks to change how they operate (slightly I admit, but then that's what they are doing voluntary to avoid explicit regulations/fines for their practices).
One last thought here is that everyone needs to be able to show proof that he is legally using MS Office. And in big organizations licenses (although they might have MS site licenses) are a headache. How come that they cannot put a similar amount of energy into keeping track how they come to have my data?
Well, look at it like this, when such laws become standard around the globe, and for example the EU decides to reject the US-EU data safe heaven idiocy, US businesses will overload the phone system in DC to get such laws in the US too, because more and more revenue will be lost, because it will be simply illegal to use an US provider to do anything related with personal data. Until this happens I guess nothing will happen in the US on this front.
Well, while it seems to have superficial differences the Indian law (as described here) is rather similar to the EU data protection directive.
Tiny issues include:
- the form of the consent. One has to see how that is being handled, but consent to handle personal information is required in the EU too.
- some issues are also around what is a person-linked information. IPv4 addresses are ruled sometimes so, sometimes not. IPv6 addresses almost for sure will be person-linked. Did I mention that in practice Apache's default configuration is illegal? Notice how the EU has forced most (even US-based) ad networks to work around that by at least masking the last byte of the address.
- The right to know what a company stores about you, where it got that information from, and to correct wrong entries is rather natural. Depending upon where you ask in the EU data protection is considered either law, constitutional law, or a basic human right.
- The only thing that has made this in the past "easier to ignore" is that the EU considers US companies that pledge to keep their laws to be legal targets of at least some personal information. (Notice that EC2 expanded first with data centers into the EU, because of data protection laws in the EU).
- Notice that gmail/gapps are illegal to use (at least businesses) in a good part of the globe. E.g. even Canadian entities have decided not to use Google's offerings because of Canadian privacy laws. Basically the US approach of NO privacy (or actually privacy only in some niches, like HIPAA) is costing US business revenue. It will only get worse with time.
A combination of cell broadcast (address all mobiles by area via the cell tower) and FlashSMS (an SMS that pops up on the screen directly).
Both stuff from the 90s (FlashSMS can be easily sent by normal users, with the right program, OTOH, never seen Cellbroadcast here around.)
Sorry, you misunderstood the concept of LTS distributions. One feature of them is that everything (and that means app versions) stays the same, so if you can some scripts to deploy it, it will just work. No new version of FooBar, that needs a new foobar.conf will pop up. Actually in some scenarios, even fidelity at the UI level is a requirement. (Be it for legal reasons, or because of users that learn to do certain procedures without understanding it deeply, my worst case was "move the mouse 2cm to the right, 1cm down, left-click, ...." kind of user.)
yacc
The funny part is, that medical doctors in wide parts of Europe use non-SI units, e.g. blood pressure is measured in mmHg (which is the rise of one mm [that's the SI part *g*] of Quicksilver), ...
Well, as it happens we use probably half the time before tube the PS3 to stream from our PCs upnpservers. The rest are mostly shows recorded by the cable settop box, watching "live" TV has got to the point where it's the exception.
We probably could survive without the cable settop box, but then it's free (triple play, phone, premium tv and 100mbit internet costs practically the same as 100mbit internet alone (it's something like 69.90 versus 70.00)).
Guess it's even more feasible in the US where services like hulu allow you to watch TV via Internet wholly legally, ...
Well, considering that there are two additional escalation steps:
*) emulate a human-like access pattern that works at a human-speed.
*) passively record data via a proxy when you normally browse.
Add to this multiple IP addresses, and catching your scraper becomes so much more problematic.
Or the country that does not want to accept the International War Crime Tribunal, because their Armed Forces routinely commit violations of International Law?
Or the country that considers it absolutely okay, to try to kill it's enemies with remote drones, accepting quite a bit of civilian collateral damage. (Hmmm, you sure that the world trade center might not have contained at least one bad guy. Sorry for the collateral civilian damage. Please consider that the stronger party has way less right to overdo "self-defense" than a weak party.)
Or the country that considers due process irrelevant when it comes to really important things like copyright infringement (and no that is not theft).
Ever wondered how many innocent people are not allowed to fly, because they happen to share the name with somebody that might be a terrorist?
You do realize the US has laws on the books after 9/11 that allows to arrest a person, keep her/him for an indefinite time period locked up and without communication, without due process.
Again, the FBI is also allowed basically to get any information on citizens, including a gag order that makes it so that the public never realizes the overall quantity of such requests, just by a FBI agent certifying that the situation matches a broad spectrum of situations.
Then we've got the Guantanamo Bay thing, which is just a symptom of the greater issue. The US government breaks it's own laws and if it does not so, it cooperates with regimes that can routinely do what the US would like to do and just happens to transport the prisoner to that country. Nixon had to go over the idea that he is above the law
Hint, does not work for my FF4 on Linux. And trying to click on any of the links gives me a facebook login page. Sick.
As I pointed out earlier, the whole SWIFT treaty is problematic. The US pays lip-service to European standards, but in practice they just ignore them. And the EU/national authorities in Europe allow that to happen.
The article is primarily about the German national authorities not knowing what to do with a totally reasonable request as outlined in the SWIFT treaty. Now it's arguably the US to be faulted for not providing procedures to fulfill their obligations or if the European authorities should be faulted for not inquiring about these procedures when the treaty went operational. I probably know why the German authorities had no idea (because the treaty was passed at the EU level and such information takes time to sicker to national institutions that might be involved in handling them) and I probably know why the US authorities did what they did (the whole concept of privacy is really alien to them, might as well require them to process requests in all official EU languages :-P)
Well, the problem is that the US meddles in our politics.
The article mentioned is an example. Privacy requirements (which go by the fine name of data protection directive[EU]/law[countries] btw), are in most European countries a constitutional (sometimes even explicit I think, most often interpreted by supreme courts) civil right. The EU data protection directive reflects this importance.
The US agreed basically to provide for the European citizens civil right "protection of personal data". Now one of our MEP (Member European Parliament). What he found out:
-) the German authorities have not prepared for this case.
-) The US has browbeat the EU to rubberstamp all data requests without even inquiring what they are for? (Can anyone say "economic espionage"?)
-) The US seems to have forgotten to provide "business processes" (as in a "printed form" or a "website" where inquiries might have been sent.)
So if we want to distribute minus points, two for the US (by not following procedures for data inquiries [these miss the explanation for what the data will be used], and by not even providing a way to fulfill it's obligations [which is kind of not surprising, as the US has a completely different point of view on data keeping, basically citizens have practically no rights, the government can do what it want]), and 2 minus points to European/member state authorities (for letting inquiries go forward that do not explain why they are needed, and for not preparing for citizen inquiries).
I know this sounds strange to the Americans, but the EU has privacy regulations that make processing of data that can be linked to a specific person very HIPAA-ish.
(e.g. anyone that processes such data in the private sector needs to offer a service where a person can ask for a report what is stored on them (that's what the MEP in the article basically tried to do), and offer deletion (if there is no legal justification to keeping it)/modification (if the data is wrong). Government entities are basically only allowed to do data processing if they are authorized to do so by law.)
After the shocking news that the US government does not honoring a treaty (actually they do half-honor it, they take what the other side offers, but they do not live up to their own side of it), I've got even more shocking news, the sun raises usually somewhere in the east, and sets in the west, I'm almost sure.
And yes, some of the nicest people that I know are Americans. And the US government does not just shit on their international partners, they have also this tendency to shit on their own population. Many slogans about the US being a free, with guaranteed civil rights, law abiding democracy, are nowadays just that, slogans. About as much related to reality as an advertisement for breakfast cereals suggesting them to be healthy and helping you to keep your weight, ...
Gag orders, punishments without judicial review (e.g. domains seizures, keeping a "terrorist" [defined as anyone without power that the local DHS flunky dislikes enough] locked up for extended periods), no rule of law (noticed how entertainment companies don't pay 6 figures per infringed song when they do it? Notice how the government tends to ignore the parts of the constitution and laws it dislikes? (E.g. noticed how the commerce clause is abused to allow the federal government to extend their ability to govern practically anything?)
You do realize that the hardware guidelines what is allowed and what not, for WP7 phones is so narrow that we've seen the whole range of "innovation" already?
I'd argue that with Android they'd be able to at least put a Nokia branded UI and other enhancement into it. E.g. they'd be allowed to support Qt on Android (alternative execution environments are allowed, as long they follow the Android security model)
With MS, they are not even allowed to keep Qt which is technically a rather sound cross platform environment. So anybody that has been listening to Nokia's roadmap the last years, is now assessing the bloddy spot on their back, ...
Intel hears about it from the press. Well, with such friends you don't need enemies. Wonder what the new CEO does to enemies, if he treats his partners like that? Send extermination squads?
Basically, Nokia just managed to commit suicide. They managed to piss off the developers, industry partners, customers, and what for? A phone monoculture with such strict hardware guidelines, that all WP7 phones look quite similar. And as some reviewers have commented, the current WP7 hardware guidelines are quite nice, well, compared to Androids from two years ago ;)
So a company that is still big, but shrinking in relevance, bets on the weakest option, which forces it to back-stab it's own partners, and which gives it only tiny leeway to compete?
Guess you use public transport too, I mean they do it better.
Hint: better has an implied parameter of the half order used to sort the alternatives. Actually humans are so defective that they use anything resembling a half order sometimes, but that's another story.
So if you definition of better involves "better for the environment" (hint: that's again a better, and you can figure out what is "better" for the environment), being able to read/work/nap, the price (it's usually lower than the real costs of driving, hint: you need to consider capital costs, service costs, and so on and not only the cheapest part, gas), than public transport is really better.
Now if better for you is to be free of a schedule, to be able to travel to any reasonable point more or less directly, have some privacy while traveling, ... than you'll probably consider a car to be better than public transport.
Now applied to mail handling, it's easy to see that there are similar trade offs here. Google is the "standardized public transport", that is more reliable, non-tiring to the user solution. But if you need to do custom stuff, react to say SMTP envelopes, run a mail based incident response system, run a mailing list, than running it via Google's IMAP/SMTP services might be less than perfect. (Some software might be setup to use POP3/IMAP/SMTP, but others might want to be installed into the mail server more intimately.)
yacc143
Sorry, somebody else posted 2 millions as a reliable number, LOL. Anyway, guess that means slightly over 6 billion do care? Wow, logic for retards.
I mean, how do you know how many iToys there are? Not even Apple wants you to know, and worse, they even make reverse engineering the serial no via statistical methods hard.
Btw, did somebody mention, that on the smartphone market, Android has outgrown all other actors? How can Apple even try to compete in the long run, especially as it obviously does not cater to some segments (e.g. the ones that care about controlling their own devices, people that want to use most websites (e.g. Flash, as somebody managed to survey the situation, 10 of 10 websites of the top 10 brands require Flash unconditionally), ...
So basically, as with the iPhone Apple will loose the Tablet space the same way, just by the numbers. As some economists have found out, Google has unleashed a monster with Android, but they focused on how Google will not necessarily profit from that. Guess what they've forgot is that Google already profits from avoiding a vendor-lock-in to some other vendor, so even if the "mobile OS" is a free commodity, it's a strategic gain for Google.
Yet somehow Apple managed to clean house in the market on their first try. I doubt anyone learned any lessons other than not to run a desktop OS on the tablet. Hell, they even had the iPad itself to look at for inspiration, and still failed to come out with a compelling alternative.
Hardly. Apple release a sized up iPhone, that is not very esthetic (but that's on the eyes of beholder, I'm just going by the spontaneous reaction of my 10yrs old daughter, ugly sized up iPhone, when she saw it the first time), with a nonfunctional OS (The stupid thing was single tasking at the UI level, that's so 1980s), non ergonomic (the iPad is rather heavy for it's puny functionality), fixed battery which makes extending the runtime outside a PITA, ...
No Apple just managed to ride it through on their brand, but will get them only to some point.
What? "Turned a profit" is notable praise? Archos a successful tablet maker? Galaxy Tab sold well? With a small return rate? WTF?
Well, numbers are very suspect here, Apple does not release numbers, nobody really does. Fact is when I walked through a local mall before christmas, basically every relevant shop had iPads in stock and advertised them. My Archos, my wife had to hunt down on Amazon, and the delivery Amazon got was gone in less than 24 hours. All local shops listed them out of stock, will be replenished in 4-6 weeks.
Now that proves nothing, but it suggests that vendors overestimated demand for the iPad, and underestimated the demand for Archos tablets.
22% was based on the deliberately misleading numbers put forth by Samsung. And even with those completely false numbers, that puts Apple at 78% (and much higher with the actual numbers).
So where do your reliable numbers for shipped and sold iPads come from? I mean, NOBODY publishes them. Apple does not even split out the bilance numbers by unit. So WHERE do you get these reliable numbers? My observation, outside the US, which is a special case anyway, having lived in the communication stone age for a long time, the iPad has been quite in stock
Why would they be a fad? Because people bought too many iPads and not enough Android tablets?
Actually, I don't think it will be a fad, it's more or less a question of what dimension will prove out to be most practicable. I've got at home (not for me, but if I add up all family members), tablets/mobiles ranging from 10.1"-3.5" displays, running Android, Maemo, iOS, and I have to admit that the 10" display is nicer for reading than my 3.5" Nokia. OTOH, it's slightly less portable, and for long stays outside, you need some case to carry it, you cannot put it into your jacket. Furthermore, I personally consider any onscreen keyboard a very inferior alternative to a real keyboard.
Funny, on my 1024x660 10,1" Archos tablet, the builtin apps look quite nicely scaled. Even Non-Archos apps e.g. Google Market which is available only inofficially for the Archos look perfectly scaled and fine.
This might be because Android, since Version 1.0 (which did not support different screensizes or big screens at all) has been using a descriptive layout UI, which means, that all apps that do not abuse that (basically emulating x/y positioning and abusing the tools in the process), scale sensibly to a bigger screen. Probably not perfectly, and in cases it might make more sense to add additional UI elements instead of scaling existing ones.
Btw, the only thing that does not "scale" to the Tablet format in practice are ads. Ads that would be bothersome on a 3.2" 320x480 screen are hard to notice on a 10.1" 1024x600 screen :)
Considering that the browser can be used to install "offline-useable" webapps, and somewhere in the web there might be a page that links such offline capable apps (the main villain here seems to be a small Californian company by the name of Google???), so the browser is clearly in the business of providing an alternate market place, right?
(Actually, postulating that there are more than one such page, I guess it's a case of an emergency, pull the browser, it can introduce multiple alternate market places, plus these can use alternate payment methods, ...)
So will Google be remote-destructing all instances of webbrowsers with support for Google GEARS, HTML5 or similar on Android devices?
Considering that OP asks for ssh, one might assume that he is from the Unix/Linux space, hence a Nokia N900 that is the ultimate hacker friendly phone makes sense.
The biggest issue I've found with the keyoard that you need Fn to enter digits, and the dot is Fn-less hence, entering IP addresses needs some getting used to.
Basically you are getting a ARM based Linux subsubsub notebook, with a X11 based UI that is appropiate for the size. And the form factor makes it a nice phone too.
Drawbacks:
-) the usual battery drain problem (basically if you are a power user you probably want to have a second charged pack at hand, a fully charged battery can be drained in 3 hours if you use it nonstop)
-) some stuff like MMS (who is willing to pay for that?) need 3rd party apps. Other nice stuff like a Wifi hotspot or Bluetooth tethering need to be installed from extras-devel.
-) default kernel comes without iptables, sigh.
Other goodies:
-) Firefox based default browser.
-) Very well done Skype integration.
-) The phone works well as an UMTS modem over USB (if you need to tether on the road for your laptop).
-) Terminal app, and trivial root access, hence you can play completely e.g. with the network stack as you need it. (My home setup is: N900 tethered via USB to my desktop, accessing the Internet via the desktop, with a VNC client on the desktop to control the N900. If the cable modem fails, the N900 still accesses the Internet via the desktop, but the desktop uses the N900 as it's fallback UMTS modem)
Well, actually comparing US to EU employers (loosely spoken, as I always work as a contractor, so I've got basically no legal rights anywhere anyway), US employers tend to care about their "employees" way more than European ones. Guess that might not apply to somebody easily replaceable, and n=1 is a slight small probe for statistics.
Furthermore, I'd not call the US free of workplace rules, it's just that beyond the federal one, many states have their own regulations on top. Btw, it's quite similar to the EU, where there might be EU directives specifying standards, but the actual laws are enacted by the member countries. That's why in many areas most countries in the EU have their own laws that tend to be aweful similar to each other.
And please use this format that we use for our drones for murdering inconvenient "enemys" that we do not want to talk about in a court of law?