That's better
These tablets don't have Microsoft in 'em - so they could be good. They're Android Intel tablets.
2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
> They can counter your counter with, "No copyright, no incentive, so no new works.
And you know what? I think we're ok with that answer. It's not true anyway. There's no copyright on Grimm's fairy tales and the sell just fine.
>Oh, by the way, if you even hope to get another term, you better play along with us.
Ah. This is the part we have a problem with. We shall see.
They want a copyright term of forever minus a day, preemptive control over freedom of speech and due process of law, and a prison term of five years for a little girl singing "happy birthday" on youtube.
How about a counter offer of: abolish copyright entirely, and let them come hat in hand begging for fourteen years and lax enforcement.
@Dazed and Confused Yup. I said it at the time that Apple filed suit. Motorola invented the commercial cellular phone - on both sides of the transmission. They've been active in the radio business as long as there's been one, getting patents the whole time. Apple is in a world of hurt here, and they didn't have to be. Moto normally isn't litigious.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
The iPad is so cheap because iOS is thin and light. It doesn't require a lot of compute and memory resources, an abundance of storage just for the OS. Android likewise. But Windows does.
This means that the "Bill of Materials" or BOM to make a device that runs Windows will quite simply cost more. With margins already razor thin, bringing the retail price in line with the iPad is just not possible.
And so this war is over before it begins.
That money for the 60M tablets sold in 2011 was just surplus. It didn't come out of anybody's laptop budget. Wink, wink.
And the 100M tablets to sell this year, and the SmartTVs, Set-top-boxes and whatnot - likewise fairy money sprinkled from the wings of angels.
"Also, do we have a good understanding of how the universe truly is shaped? Is it spherical, fluted, tail-like? Is it tubular, is it bell-shaped?"
There's a certain ambiguity about the shape of something so large that disparate parts of it are mutually nonexistent. I'm going to go with the simple answer: "Yes."
2011 saw the Linux kernel put into the hands of more new people than any year ever - in the form of Android. November found the sum at over 200,000,000 Android users, and December saw the number swelling by 700,000 per day. With over half the market in the US, and soon the world, Android looks to be the delivery mechanism to finally bring Linux to the masses.
Does this not deserve at least a mention in your year-end Linux wrapup?
And people are loving them at prices from $79 to over $800. Transformer Prime is a standout hit, sold out everywhere - as was the original Transformer. Kindle Fire is just killing it. Android is now taking something like a third of the tablet market (all of the rest being iPads, of course).
People would love Intel Android tablets too, but there's just nobody to make them.
What there's no market for is Windows tablets. You can find them if you want them, but apparently nobody does.
But none of the stated partners are going to give us that on Intel silicon. This is coming to be an old story. With Linux netbooks were sleek and quick, could be made cheap with a lower BOM and driving ever lower prices. With Windows, not so much. Now you can get a regular laptop for $300, people just aren't going to be that interested in poorly performing Windows on a netbook that costs even more than that.
We're loving our Android tablets but Intel's at a loss to find a vendor that will really build one instead of promising to but never shipping it. They keep going back to the same old partners who have let them down time and again when it comes to non-Microsoft platforms.
So once again Intel will have made a really interesting bit of kit that probably comes to naught.
A shame that. I'd have gone for a Medfield Android tablet.
As humans we crave progress.
As a monopolist Microsoft is well proven to prevent progress. They're not at all ashamed of it - they're quite proud. With their patent suits, their killing of competing software vendors, their brutal business deals like Sendo and Nokia, their total dominance of PC vendors they prove it anew every week. They're quite fine with it. It's not enough for them to win: everybody else has to lose also.
We're not OK with that. And we're not ever going to be.
And the astroturfing thing has to stop too. That's not OK either. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/dec/19/nokia-microsoft-lumia-comments
It was back in April by Adam Hartung. Title was "Sell Research In Motion. Now." At the time shares of RIM were selling for $53. Now they're under $14.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2011/04/17/sell-research-in-motion-now/
Seldom to you get such beautiful timing.
@Gil Grissum: Bill Gates is the Chairman of the Board at Microsoft. He's the Boss. The other members of the Board are hand-picked by him. Steve Ballmer is Bill's guy, his college roomie, a guy that can be trusted to do what you tell him enjoying far more success than he might have hoped for in his wildest dreams. Steve knows Bill's goals are his bread and butter. A wise guy like Bill keeps predictable fools in reserve. The board is not going to oust Steve Ballmer until Bill Gates tells them to, and that ain't gonna happen as long as Steve delivers what Bill wants, and Steve's perfectly on target.
Steve Ballmer's not doing what YOU want him to do - but you're not the boss of him. Bill Gates has found a way to own less than 1 percent of a publicly held corporation, nor show up every day, and yet control it utterly. He started these lessons in 1984, and being the brilliant guy he is has mastered them.
There are lots of voracious competitors in Microsoft, Sinofsky chief among them. How Sinofsky has failed to figure this out I don't know, since he's also brilliant. None of them are going to win the top spot because they're not the predictable committed fool. As soon as they figure this out, they're outta there, because they're voracious competitors and need to win to have internal validation.
Steve is doing the job Bill gave him, and he's doing well at it or he'd be long gone because Bill Gates considers personal loyalty a weakness. Now if you're an investor or a consumer and aren't happy about what Steve is doing, you know what to do about that. But Bill doesn't care because Steve's going to help him get the maximum money out. That means that the pathologically competitive Bill Gates is going to max the all-time "giver" score in the game he's now (and some would say since 1987) playing in.
Modern pundits and analysts are really lost about what Bill Gates' strategy is because it predates the rise of Google and the Internet. But he was alway crystal clear: he understands that incredible, unspendable wealth is a burden his children should not bear. He's a brilliant competitive ass, and having wonthe IT game and become bored with it he moves to another. Having won the computer game before his 26th birthday it's natural that he should search about for a new challenge to keep him occupied until he reach his dotage. That he counts coup on competitors after telling them what his strategy is is just gravy. There's no reason why he should not use his victory over IT to give advantage in the next game. To give up earned advantages is plain stupid.
I'd give that he's won the "giver" game now too, as his program to cajole the world's billionaires has leveraged his own personal wealth dozens of times, to the point where it pledged wealth exceeds the US national debt in the year Microsoft was founded. He's playing a bigger game now than Microsoft ever was, nor ever could hope to be. At least it doesn't have the prevention-of-progress taint of his previous game. This new game has no top end, no true victory because the goal isn't to be the biggest giver ever. It's to raise the best giver bar so high that nobody else in subsequent history can get over it. No matter how much wealth and effort is poured into it, there is always more to it. It's the global philanthropist version of a Zynga game, and good to occupy him until the end of his days.
Microsoft has to die for Bill Gates to rise from its shadow and be recognized for the great giver that he is without the taint of its dire methods which, if it were killed, will be lost to time. The process of killing Microsoft is under way, and Steve Ballmer is the chief assassin whether he knows it or not. Sometimes - rarely - you have a job that only a fool can do.
The only fly in this ointment is if Steve Ballmer should find out about Bill Gates' contempt for him, his intellectual deficiency, his religious faith in The Bill, and then be able and willing to figure out how to counter it before Bill kicked him out rather than accept it's good money for a guy like him - which seems unlikely in the extreme. Which, if you think about it, is the right way to choose your henchmen if you're an evil genius.
In my opinion they'll ride this horse all the way down to the end, and frankly it's taking longer than they would like.