I think you might be confusing the Real World with your lab. In a lab, you have complete control over every variable and there's no business pressure to produce a workable solution that actually fits within a budget. The Real World doesn't work like that.
The licensed professional engineer has a moral, ethical, and legal obligation to produce safe products. Regardless of job security pressures, the engineer can, and *must* push back against any attempts by management to compromise the safety of a system for a quick buck. Cheap shit is allowed to fail (you get what you pay for), but under no circumstances should it EXPLODE.
Doing things on the cheap does not excuse the engineer from improper practice. Yes, using inferior designs, materials, and methodologies can get you a cheaper product, but in the end its failure modes still need to be enumerated and controlled.
Pidgin is an all-one client for proprietary networks. How can they reliably make voice and video extensions without the help of AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc who would rather then not have it?
The same way they make text chat work for AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc. A closed video protocol is no different than a closed text protocol, just much harder to reverse engineer:)
I for one am disappointed at the MSN support in libpurple. It's been *how long* since MSNP14 came out, and we still don't have support for it? "Experimental" MSNP14 support has been in for ages, but has never moved up to mainline. C'mon guys, I want offline chat support dammit:(
I would hope NASA would have thought of this before.
I'm sure they have. In fact I think this article is only news to everyone *but* NASA. Seriously guys, thermal cycles, stress cycles, all cycles eventually cause failure. So long as this failure is foreseen and accounted for we're in the clear.
Your vehicle's axle also has a definitely lifetime, defined as the number of times it can turn before it has a X% chance of failure (fancy term for OMFG IT BROKE). The trick is knowing what range your lifetime lies in, and making sure the vehicle isn't driven to that point without changing the part, or reasonably ensuring that when the part does eventually fail, it fails within certain parameters so as to be safe.
Funny, but not the same effect. The dead rat is just shattering, the glass will crack but otherwise retain its shape - the causes of both are unrelated.
Thermal cycling. Cracks can occur in many structural materials while *cooling*, not while heating. Next time try heating a piece of glassware to an unholy temperature, and then dropping it into an ice water bath.
Mmm, you'd be right, except that jobs don't always work that way. Here's what I see from my time in college, both in traditional engineering programs and CS:
Now that the market is picking back up, we're seeing a resurgence in CS program enrollment, but many people drop out fairly quickly. Why? I've seen many of my peers go this way, and here's a basic demographics breakdown from what I can observe.
IMHO is because people are starting to figure out that there isn't that much money in CS unless you're willing to *dedicate* yourself to it. Which is to say, if you were not a hard core CS-type before even leaving high school, odds are you are not the type that's going to be making big bucks doing insane code somewhere. Nor are you the type to *enjoy* doing such work, so you're either going to hate your high-paying code-hacking job, or you're going to be a VB monkey somewhere, which might be worse. CS is not for everyone, and the "easy" code jobs no longer pay the ridiculous salaries they used to. The "good money" in the field is strictly reserved for more advanced engineering type jobs.
Many people also entered CS with an intent to shoot for management. Of course, the realization here is that for people with strong soft skills, management in other fields (e.g. finance) is far more lucrative, and unless you had a serious interest in tech, managing here vs. there makes little difference, except the paycheck.
So, to address your conclusions:
1) The money isn't enough after all. That's how a free market works.
Yes, with caveats. The money is still great for "real" CS type engineers. The type that are doing search algorithms and some even more hardcore things that are above *my* head. The difference is that, in general, the industry is no longer paying 6-digits for PHP hackers.
2) Something other than money, perhaps working conditions or perceived (lack of) socialization, is severely discouraging young talent in America from pursuing computing.
Perhaps, all the working environments I've been in have been the same old, same old. Perks are nice, but they do not turn a bad job good. Socialization is IMHO not a real problem in the tech workplace - unless you're not a real geek, in which case you'll feel oddly out of place...
and I can't help but trust their own reasons for their own actions.
At the risk of sounding like a cop out... I think the crux of it is that people realize CS is not for everyone. It requires a certain mindset, and for people who aren't in the right demographic, a code job is downright painful.
How is this insightful? I know plenty of fellow graduates (Canadians) who are making $100K+ fresh out of college. That's not "crappy pay" by any measure I think (these are undergrad degrees, not masters or PhD). Their benefits are also among the best - I know plenty of H1B people at MS who are probably getting *better* medical insurance than they had in Canada! Their vacation and stock plans aren't too shabby either.
I have observed first-hand the shortage of tech workers. We're talking top-tier tech workers, not VB script monkeys. There are PLENTY of great grads coming out of American schools - but it is *not enough* to fuel what I see is a surging demand for skilled coders.
So stop twisting IBM's words. It's absolutely true - there are plenty of talented students coming out of American schools - but not enough. Just because there aren't enough MIT grads to go around doesn't mean IBM needs to start hiring community college code monkeys.
It's time to get rid of the corporate propaganda that we are somehow losing the next Einstein. Sure, there are a handful of these people, literally, but the vast majority are very average VB and ASP people working for Infosys et. al. anyway.
So why don't we police the implementation of the H1B system, make sure that people that are being brought in are legitimate, long-term workers, who are as skilled as the best of America, and are *actually* at the top of their respective fields? As opposed to, as you say, VB/ASP monkeys.
Believe me, you're not the only one frustrated that a large chunk of the H1B quota is taken up by talentless, cheap labor, while the rest of us educated types who would love to work in the US are sitting on huge waiting lists.
I don't think anyone's ever claimed that the H1B program's purpose is to attract the next Einstein. There are *tens of thousands* of highly educated people who are graduating from universities around the world every year. Loss of these people means giving the leg up to some other country out there, one that may not be as friendly to the USA as we want. We're not talking about Einsteins, we're talking about generic, but nonetheless talented people.
Seriously, most of the companies that hire H1Bs are profit-only driven scum that have no notion of national interest or pride anyway.
Even Microsoft, Sun, and IBM? Take it from someone in a Canadian college who's been actively courted by all of these companies. For one thing, their pay offers were on par with any American graduate. In fact, I know for a fact that many were offering as much as they do for MIT graduates. The certainly aren't out for cheap labor. Not to mention H1B's aren't free, and are in fact quite expensive to get. The total cost of these tech companies hiring someone from across the border is actually *higher* than hiring someone locally.
Secondly, it was made clear that they were only interested in the cream of the crop. Interviews were rigorous and highly competitive, and they *definitely* weren't looking for VB/ASP joe blows. All the people that I know who received offers were among the top in their respective classes, and all have huge extracurricular experience under their belt.
IMHO the H1B issue is lumped into two sides - the "legitimate" companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc, who are trying to bring in as much talent as they can, and the outsourcers like InfoSys. IMHO one side needs to be fixed, the other needs to be supported.
I think the complaint is that skilled students who would like to immigrate her legally (i.e. change their student visa to a valid work visa) do not have enough support to do so. The complaint is that we're sending scores of highly talented, highly trained (we trained 'em!) individuals home, when they could be doing more for the American bottom line if they stayed.
I agree with the extension of the visa. The country needs not just any immigrants, but the type that is highly educated and highly trained - allowing students an extended period of working time will only expand the high-education talent pool of the USA. The first step here I think is realizing that for *many* students, the "stated purpose" of their student visa is in fact not just purely studying, but also the opportunity to demonstrate their worthiness for immigration.
Maybe we need to officially recognize these as dual-intent visas.
I'm a mechanical/electrical engineer by training, and what you're saying makes no sense to us. Mistakes are made in the laboratory, where things are allowed to blow up and start fires. Once you hit the real world the considerations are *very different*. While it's possible that this fire could be caused by something entirely unforeseeable (unlikely given our experience in this field), it's also possible that this was due to improperly designed systems.
I don't suppose you'd be singing the same tune if this was a bridge collapse that killed hundreds. There's a reason why engineering costs a lot, and that's directly correlated to how little failure we can tolerate.
ThePlanet is a popular host for hosting resellers. Many of the no-name shared hosting providers out there host at ThePlanet, amongst other places. So... Many of these customers would be individuals (or very small companies), who in turn dole out space/bandwidth to their own clients. The total number of customers affected can be 10-20x the number reported because of this.
One of the tricks with Rogers is that BT download is (more or less) unthrottled, but upload is completely crippled. Have your buddy try it out.
That's one of the more insidious things that Rogers appears to be doing - they know even the average Joe will bitch and moan if their BT gets cut off, but nobody will notice if they can't upload. Kill trackers and BT in general by denying it seeders? Pretty ingenious.
I am with Vianet and being Bell throttled. I am canceling all Bell services (third party DSL, landline and long distance) and moving to Cable + VOIP.
Thanks for supporting the *other* evil empire:) IMHO Rogers is infinitely more evil than Bell. Rogers has been blocking P2P forever, long before Bell even started thinking of doing the same thing. You will also find Rogers prices to be ludicrously high, the networks even more congested, and the throttling even more draconian.
No, this isn't the time to cancel Bell, this is the time to hit up the CRTC, hit up your MP, and let me know exactly how unhappy you are with their lack of action. Organize write-ins to your MP to spur them into action, this is the ONLY long term solution to our problem.
One of the reasons they may have done this is that another highly competitive physics engine (PhysX, formerly known as Novodex) is *also* available for free. I don't think you can create a mass-distributed product for free with it, though. This may just be a competitive move for Havok, as opposed to something done entirely out of the good of their hearts:)
Warning: It's been a few months since I've touched physics engines... so maybe things have changed somewhat since then.
ODE's solver is horrendously slow compared to commercial physics packages. The plus side is that it has a more physically accurate solver... which unfortunately most games simply do not need. ODE is geared towards physical SIMULATIONS, whereas Novodex/PhysX and Havok are built more towards *looking* physically correct, as opposed to being *actually* correct. The difference is in the scale of physics problem they can solve. Havok has proven itself able to crack thousands of interacting rigid body objects, while ODE buckles on the same hardware.
As for Bullet, I really don't know... It's a very young project and I haven't had much experience with it.
What? All of T-Mobiles plans are available prepaid without a contract - these aren't pay-as-you-go, these are full-fledged plans just like the contract ones.
Then maybe in twenty years you look back and ask yourself why you let the industry take away your rights.
FUD. Are you kidding? Since when is having *software drivers* a right? It would be *nice* if hardware manufacturers supported Linux, and even nicer if said drivers are open sourced. But this is not a RIGHT. Do not dilute a word as important as "right" with such a lowball definition.
Of course the convenience of getting all machines to work seems most important now, but free software is not about convenience, it's about ethics.
Woah woah woah. Ethics? Freedom I get - we would be free to customize drivers, fork them, branch them as we please. Security, I get - ability to scrutinize the integrity of the code we're running. ETHICS? Since when is the *refusal to give away your code for free* in violation of ANY sane sense of ethics?
If we stop caring about proprietary drivers then the hardware manufacturers will think we don't care. And they probably even go a step further and DRM+TC [wikipedia.org] everything.
You mean like they've done for Windows, right? But no, wait, they haven't. The *vast vast vast* majority of Windows drivers you can download today have NO real protection on them (except the fact that you don't have source). There are even active internet communities hacking video drivers, sound drivers, etc, with no apparent backlash from hardware manufacturers.
You're just spouting FUD. Open source drivers is a nice ideal, and even nicer if we could have it, but we are by NO MEANS entitled to it.
Yeah, NVidia and Adobe are really feeling the heat to provide source code now that millions of Linux users have demonstrated that a little temporary convenience thanks to binary blobs is acceptable.
And on the other hand, yeah, Nvidia and Adobe are *really* feeling the heat to provide source code now that some fringe distro with zero userbase (and negligible userbase potential) totally lacks drivers.
Open source drivers would be nice, but I fail to see how this distro does anything to further that goal.
Even the betas? Firefox 2 comes with most modern Linux distros anyways, so an install is moot. Installing the beta, though, required several package updates, and in the case where I was on an old RHEL machine, manually building from source when the package manager didn't HAVE a new enough version of the package on hand.
You can make a point about beta software being not ready for general consumption - but compare with OS X and Windows, where the FF3 beta was available in a ready-to-go form with NO dependency issues on ANY machines...
They aren't going to attract new buyers with hype like last time. Most people who really want one have one.
You're assuming that the phone is a "simple" 3G update, in which case you're probably right. The number of people who didn't go for it because of the EDGE/3G hubbub is pretty small.
I fully expect Apple to have something major up their sleeve, software-wise. We've already got evidence of geotagging for photos, and business apps, but if Apple pulls another ace out of their sleeve that is as impressive as, say, Mobile Safari, then they're going to get some new customers.
Oh, and all signs point to real GPS and some file transfer capability. Cut and paste is unfortunately probably not coming:( And who the heck prints off a phone?
But the iPhone IS massively crippled, and attempts to un-cripple it are met with update-to-brick attacks
There's no evidence of this. Only one firmware update has bricked phones, and this was found to be due to an *improper unlock procedure* that overwrote some data, but not others, resulting in a very confused updater and hence, the bricking. You cannot seriously expect Apple to bend over backwards to make sure they're not bricking hacked phones.
And if you look back into interwebnet history, you will see that the iPhone Dev Team released a patcher that "fixed" the broken unlock, and from that point forward no Apple update has ever bricked a phone. It just restores it to its locked, factory state, which is perfectly reasonable.
This leaves the open platform with an opportunity to make massive functionality improvements and additions that Apple/AT&T-etc. can't or won't match. And that could driver the shift.
You're missing the main reason the iPhone is popular - usability. It has an incredibly unified UI that most phones simply do not have, and its inter-app integration is impressive as well (though can be improved). Camera tied into email, maps tied into web searches, a unified contact-management database that spans calendars, phonebooks, and even websites...
... This is something that open source has not demonstrated so far. If Android will be anything like Linux, what you'll end up with is *many* disparate projects that are by themselves quite functional (and maybe even usable, but odds are most teams will not place that as a priority), but fail to integrate with each other. There will be some effort to unify these things, but like Linux what you'll simply end up with are several large camps, confused consumers, and not so much integration in anything.
Apple has a developer base that worships the ground it walks on, and this has proven to be a strength in both MacOS X and iPhone development. You've got guys that will emulate the look and feel of first-party iPhone apps to the T, and design apps with a UI-first perspective. This is what it will take to make a successful phone - a complete software suite that is integrated with each other, with consistent and logical UI. Apple is in a position to deliver this, is anyone else?
And you've nailed one of the major reasons why Linux has not taken off outside of power user, tech-geek circles. When I download Firefox, I damn well expect it to just RUN (like it does on OS X), or at the very least install without requiring any intervention on my part (like it does on Windows). On Linux I'm in package hell, I have to read documents on what dependencies the software has, make sure I match the minimum versions on all of them... And God forbid if my package repo is out of date, then I have to go hunt the pkg down, download it, tar,./configure, make, sudo make install... Oh, and once you're in THAT hell you've recursively created MORE hells, since each package you're missing ALSO has dependencies:)
Oh, I realize that this whole problem is moot if *every single app in the world* is properly managed by my package repo, then it's just a matter of typing install. But of course, this is simply not the case. There's a lot to be said for being able to deliver software to your users without any fuss, and Linux isn't QUITE there yet.
Why not? The big problem with DRM is that I don't get to put the content that *I paid money for* on devices that I want, or put it into any format I please. Since I didn't pay for it, who cares? If they want to restrict me to viewing through their website, sure, whatever. It's not like I paid for it, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The licensed professional engineer has a moral, ethical, and legal obligation to produce safe products. Regardless of job security pressures, the engineer can, and *must* push back against any attempts by management to compromise the safety of a system for a quick buck. Cheap shit is allowed to fail (you get what you pay for), but under no circumstances should it EXPLODE.
Doing things on the cheap does not excuse the engineer from improper practice. Yes, using inferior designs, materials, and methodologies can get you a cheaper product, but in the end its failure modes still need to be enumerated and controlled.
The same way they make text chat work for AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc. A closed video protocol is no different than a closed text protocol, just much harder to reverse engineer :)
I for one am disappointed at the MSN support in libpurple. It's been *how long* since MSNP14 came out, and we still don't have support for it? "Experimental" MSNP14 support has been in for ages, but has never moved up to mainline. C'mon guys, I want offline chat support dammit :(
My bad, I didn't mean to imply cracks cannot occur while heating :) Was merely trying to dispel the myth that things only break while being heated.
I'm sure they have. In fact I think this article is only news to everyone *but* NASA. Seriously guys, thermal cycles, stress cycles, all cycles eventually cause failure. So long as this failure is foreseen and accounted for we're in the clear.
Your vehicle's axle also has a definitely lifetime, defined as the number of times it can turn before it has a X% chance of failure (fancy term for OMFG IT BROKE). The trick is knowing what range your lifetime lies in, and making sure the vehicle isn't driven to that point without changing the part, or reasonably ensuring that when the part does eventually fail, it fails within certain parameters so as to be safe.
Funny, but not the same effect. The dead rat is just shattering, the glass will crack but otherwise retain its shape - the causes of both are unrelated.
Thermal cycling. Cracks can occur in many structural materials while *cooling*, not while heating. Next time try heating a piece of glassware to an unholy temperature, and then dropping it into an ice water bath.
Mmm, you'd be right, except that jobs don't always work that way. Here's what I see from my time in college, both in traditional engineering programs and CS:
Now that the market is picking back up, we're seeing a resurgence in CS program enrollment, but many people drop out fairly quickly. Why? I've seen many of my peers go this way, and here's a basic demographics breakdown from what I can observe.
IMHO is because people are starting to figure out that there isn't that much money in CS unless you're willing to *dedicate* yourself to it. Which is to say, if you were not a hard core CS-type before even leaving high school, odds are you are not the type that's going to be making big bucks doing insane code somewhere. Nor are you the type to *enjoy* doing such work, so you're either going to hate your high-paying code-hacking job, or you're going to be a VB monkey somewhere, which might be worse. CS is not for everyone, and the "easy" code jobs no longer pay the ridiculous salaries they used to. The "good money" in the field is strictly reserved for more advanced engineering type jobs.
Many people also entered CS with an intent to shoot for management. Of course, the realization here is that for people with strong soft skills, management in other fields (e.g. finance) is far more lucrative, and unless you had a serious interest in tech, managing here vs. there makes little difference, except the paycheck.
So, to address your conclusions:
1) The money isn't enough after all. That's how a free market works.Yes, with caveats. The money is still great for "real" CS type engineers. The type that are doing search algorithms and some even more hardcore things that are above *my* head. The difference is that, in general, the industry is no longer paying 6-digits for PHP hackers.
2) Something other than money, perhaps working conditions or perceived (lack of) socialization, is severely discouraging young talent in America from pursuing computing.Perhaps, all the working environments I've been in have been the same old, same old. Perks are nice, but they do not turn a bad job good. Socialization is IMHO not a real problem in the tech workplace - unless you're not a real geek, in which case you'll feel oddly out of place...
and I can't help but trust their own reasons for their own actions.At the risk of sounding like a cop out... I think the crux of it is that people realize CS is not for everyone. It requires a certain mindset, and for people who aren't in the right demographic, a code job is downright painful.
How is this insightful? I know plenty of fellow graduates (Canadians) who are making $100K+ fresh out of college. That's not "crappy pay" by any measure I think (these are undergrad degrees, not masters or PhD). Their benefits are also among the best - I know plenty of H1B people at MS who are probably getting *better* medical insurance than they had in Canada! Their vacation and stock plans aren't too shabby either.
I have observed first-hand the shortage of tech workers. We're talking top-tier tech workers, not VB script monkeys. There are PLENTY of great grads coming out of American schools - but it is *not enough* to fuel what I see is a surging demand for skilled coders.
So stop twisting IBM's words. It's absolutely true - there are plenty of talented students coming out of American schools - but not enough. Just because there aren't enough MIT grads to go around doesn't mean IBM needs to start hiring community college code monkeys.
So why don't we police the implementation of the H1B system, make sure that people that are being brought in are legitimate, long-term workers, who are as skilled as the best of America, and are *actually* at the top of their respective fields? As opposed to, as you say, VB/ASP monkeys.
Believe me, you're not the only one frustrated that a large chunk of the H1B quota is taken up by talentless, cheap labor, while the rest of us educated types who would love to work in the US are sitting on huge waiting lists.
I don't think anyone's ever claimed that the H1B program's purpose is to attract the next Einstein. There are *tens of thousands* of highly educated people who are graduating from universities around the world every year. Loss of these people means giving the leg up to some other country out there, one that may not be as friendly to the USA as we want. We're not talking about Einsteins, we're talking about generic, but nonetheless talented people.
Seriously, most of the companies that hire H1Bs are profit-only driven scum that have no notion of national interest or pride anyway.Even Microsoft, Sun, and IBM? Take it from someone in a Canadian college who's been actively courted by all of these companies. For one thing, their pay offers were on par with any American graduate. In fact, I know for a fact that many were offering as much as they do for MIT graduates. The certainly aren't out for cheap labor. Not to mention H1B's aren't free, and are in fact quite expensive to get. The total cost of these tech companies hiring someone from across the border is actually *higher* than hiring someone locally.
Secondly, it was made clear that they were only interested in the cream of the crop. Interviews were rigorous and highly competitive, and they *definitely* weren't looking for VB/ASP joe blows. All the people that I know who received offers were among the top in their respective classes, and all have huge extracurricular experience under their belt.
IMHO the H1B issue is lumped into two sides - the "legitimate" companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc, who are trying to bring in as much talent as they can, and the outsourcers like InfoSys. IMHO one side needs to be fixed, the other needs to be supported.
I think the complaint is that skilled students who would like to immigrate her legally (i.e. change their student visa to a valid work visa) do not have enough support to do so. The complaint is that we're sending scores of highly talented, highly trained (we trained 'em!) individuals home, when they could be doing more for the American bottom line if they stayed.
I agree with the extension of the visa. The country needs not just any immigrants, but the type that is highly educated and highly trained - allowing students an extended period of working time will only expand the high-education talent pool of the USA. The first step here I think is realizing that for *many* students, the "stated purpose" of their student visa is in fact not just purely studying, but also the opportunity to demonstrate their worthiness for immigration.
Maybe we need to officially recognize these as dual-intent visas.
I'm a mechanical/electrical engineer by training, and what you're saying makes no sense to us. Mistakes are made in the laboratory, where things are allowed to blow up and start fires. Once you hit the real world the considerations are *very different*. While it's possible that this fire could be caused by something entirely unforeseeable (unlikely given our experience in this field), it's also possible that this was due to improperly designed systems.
I don't suppose you'd be singing the same tune if this was a bridge collapse that killed hundreds. There's a reason why engineering costs a lot, and that's directly correlated to how little failure we can tolerate.
ThePlanet is a popular host for hosting resellers. Many of the no-name shared hosting providers out there host at ThePlanet, amongst other places. So... Many of these customers would be individuals (or very small companies), who in turn dole out space/bandwidth to their own clients. The total number of customers affected can be 10-20x the number reported because of this.
One of the tricks with Rogers is that BT download is (more or less) unthrottled, but upload is completely crippled. Have your buddy try it out.
That's one of the more insidious things that Rogers appears to be doing - they know even the average Joe will bitch and moan if their BT gets cut off, but nobody will notice if they can't upload. Kill trackers and BT in general by denying it seeders? Pretty ingenious.
Thanks for supporting the *other* evil empire :) IMHO Rogers is infinitely more evil than Bell. Rogers has been blocking P2P forever, long before Bell even started thinking of doing the same thing. You will also find Rogers prices to be ludicrously high, the networks even more congested, and the throttling even more draconian.
No, this isn't the time to cancel Bell, this is the time to hit up the CRTC, hit up your MP, and let me know exactly how unhappy you are with their lack of action. Organize write-ins to your MP to spur them into action, this is the ONLY long term solution to our problem.
One of the reasons they may have done this is that another highly competitive physics engine (PhysX, formerly known as Novodex) is *also* available for free. I don't think you can create a mass-distributed product for free with it, though. This may just be a competitive move for Havok, as opposed to something done entirely out of the good of their hearts :)
Warning: It's been a few months since I've touched physics engines... so maybe things have changed somewhat since then.
ODE's solver is horrendously slow compared to commercial physics packages. The plus side is that it has a more physically accurate solver... which unfortunately most games simply do not need. ODE is geared towards physical SIMULATIONS, whereas Novodex/PhysX and Havok are built more towards *looking* physically correct, as opposed to being *actually* correct. The difference is in the scale of physics problem they can solve. Havok has proven itself able to crack thousands of interacting rigid body objects, while ODE buckles on the same hardware.
As for Bullet, I really don't know... It's a very young project and I haven't had much experience with it.
What? All of T-Mobiles plans are available prepaid without a contract - these aren't pay-as-you-go, these are full-fledged plans just like the contract ones.
This seems almost soup nazi-ish (yay Godwin's Law!). It reeks of "if you don't agree with my moral stance, NO SOFTWARE FOR YOU! NEXT!"
FUD. Are you kidding? Since when is having *software drivers* a right? It would be *nice* if hardware manufacturers supported Linux, and even nicer if said drivers are open sourced. But this is not a RIGHT. Do not dilute a word as important as "right" with such a lowball definition.
Of course the convenience of getting all machines to work seems most important now, but free software is not about convenience, it's about ethics.Woah woah woah. Ethics? Freedom I get - we would be free to customize drivers, fork them, branch them as we please. Security, I get - ability to scrutinize the integrity of the code we're running. ETHICS? Since when is the *refusal to give away your code for free* in violation of ANY sane sense of ethics?
If we stop caring about proprietary drivers then the hardware manufacturers will think we don't care. And they probably even go a step further and DRM+TC [wikipedia.org] everything.You mean like they've done for Windows, right? But no, wait, they haven't. The *vast vast vast* majority of Windows drivers you can download today have NO real protection on them (except the fact that you don't have source). There are even active internet communities hacking video drivers, sound drivers, etc, with no apparent backlash from hardware manufacturers.
You're just spouting FUD. Open source drivers is a nice ideal, and even nicer if we could have it, but we are by NO MEANS entitled to it.
And on the other hand, yeah, Nvidia and Adobe are *really* feeling the heat to provide source code now that some fringe distro with zero userbase (and negligible userbase potential) totally lacks drivers.
Open source drivers would be nice, but I fail to see how this distro does anything to further that goal.
Even the betas? Firefox 2 comes with most modern Linux distros anyways, so an install is moot. Installing the beta, though, required several package updates, and in the case where I was on an old RHEL machine, manually building from source when the package manager didn't HAVE a new enough version of the package on hand.
You can make a point about beta software being not ready for general consumption - but compare with OS X and Windows, where the FF3 beta was available in a ready-to-go form with NO dependency issues on ANY machines...
You're assuming that the phone is a "simple" 3G update, in which case you're probably right. The number of people who didn't go for it because of the EDGE/3G hubbub is pretty small.
I fully expect Apple to have something major up their sleeve, software-wise. We've already got evidence of geotagging for photos, and business apps, but if Apple pulls another ace out of their sleeve that is as impressive as, say, Mobile Safari, then they're going to get some new customers.
Oh, and all signs point to real GPS and some file transfer capability. Cut and paste is unfortunately probably not coming :( And who the heck prints off a phone?
There's no evidence of this. Only one firmware update has bricked phones, and this was found to be due to an *improper unlock procedure* that overwrote some data, but not others, resulting in a very confused updater and hence, the bricking. You cannot seriously expect Apple to bend over backwards to make sure they're not bricking hacked phones.
And if you look back into interwebnet history, you will see that the iPhone Dev Team released a patcher that "fixed" the broken unlock, and from that point forward no Apple update has ever bricked a phone. It just restores it to its locked, factory state, which is perfectly reasonable.
This leaves the open platform with an opportunity to make massive functionality improvements and additions that Apple/AT&T-etc. can't or won't match. And that could driver the shift.You're missing the main reason the iPhone is popular - usability. It has an incredibly unified UI that most phones simply do not have, and its inter-app integration is impressive as well (though can be improved). Camera tied into email, maps tied into web searches, a unified contact-management database that spans calendars, phonebooks, and even websites...
... This is something that open source has not demonstrated so far. If Android will be anything like Linux, what you'll end up with is *many* disparate projects that are by themselves quite functional (and maybe even usable, but odds are most teams will not place that as a priority), but fail to integrate with each other. There will be some effort to unify these things, but like Linux what you'll simply end up with are several large camps, confused consumers, and not so much integration in anything.
Apple has a developer base that worships the ground it walks on, and this has proven to be a strength in both MacOS X and iPhone development. You've got guys that will emulate the look and feel of first-party iPhone apps to the T, and design apps with a UI-first perspective. This is what it will take to make a successful phone - a complete software suite that is integrated with each other, with consistent and logical UI. Apple is in a position to deliver this, is anyone else?
And you've nailed one of the major reasons why Linux has not taken off outside of power user, tech-geek circles. When I download Firefox, I damn well expect it to just RUN (like it does on OS X), or at the very least install without requiring any intervention on my part (like it does on Windows). On Linux I'm in package hell, I have to read documents on what dependencies the software has, make sure I match the minimum versions on all of them... And God forbid if my package repo is out of date, then I have to go hunt the pkg down, download it, tar, ./configure, make, sudo make install... Oh, and once you're in THAT hell you've recursively created MORE hells, since each package you're missing ALSO has dependencies :)
Oh, I realize that this whole problem is moot if *every single app in the world* is properly managed by my package repo, then it's just a matter of typing install. But of course, this is simply not the case. There's a lot to be said for being able to deliver software to your users without any fuss, and Linux isn't QUITE there yet.
Why not? The big problem with DRM is that I don't get to put the content that *I paid money for* on devices that I want, or put it into any format I please. Since I didn't pay for it, who cares? If they want to restrict me to viewing through their website, sure, whatever. It's not like I paid for it, right?