This deserves an upvote.

Consoles are great not because they have good specs (they mostly have shitty ones). They are great because they present developers with a fixed hardware target for a decade or so. Games development on consoles is not too dissimilar from Demo scene, just that all the little tips and tricks get applied to all those games.

Give me a fixed target and I'll optimise the hell out of it. With results.

Riiight... The NVidia scandal just didn't happen.

You forgot that the frontend is driven by RubyOnRails. In a Cloud.

That's all right, I was just joshing in the spirit of the discussion. I'm still taking their figures with a large pinch of salt (alas couldn't find a link to the original report) and find the conflation of devices most odd (does it include iPads then? Kindles?).

That will be $50 to 1GtkK4bLk3N1E6eEZr9m11QGwk5xba7C79 please ;)

So, basically, it's a table of random numbers with no real-life implications? I just cannot comprehend why would they double count Microsoft numbers that way...

I'll take it you meant it as a response to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3738737&cid=43694313 ;)

Thumbs up. Nexus 4 is actually what I use as my primary phone despite occasionally highlighting to people that if it weren't for Apple it would never have happened.

Not an unreasonable point, but, given that nobody is using Windows Phones, the fact that there is no Blackberry presence at all is rather alarming. It _might_ be statistics of device use on Microsoft campus, but I find it hard to imagine any possible slicing and dicing of statistics to come up with this.

I'm willing to bet $50 that the 'statistics' provided are made up from thin air*.

*with ether very selective or very broad interpretation of what a smartphone is + liberal selection of target markets (unspecified as far as I can tell) and perhaps just a sprinkle of straightforward dishonesty.

Given that they were asked to do that while the Windows Phone 7 was still the king of the hill with perhaps 100 users and clear roadmap to be abandoned - I'm not all that surprised.

Microsoft has tried to bribe me to port some of the software to Windows Phone as well. I played with SDK (nice, no questions asked), phone (again, absolutely reasonable and nice device) and promptly decided that my time would be better spent scratching my balls. It is a dead platform with no users and no prospects, regardless of what Microsoft/Nokia tries to tell us. Shall it change, I'll be happy to reconsider my position.

Given the lifecycle of a TV rest assured that Panasonic not only engaged with YouTube to get them to agree to use of content, but they are also likely using some secret API which is guaranteed to live for 10 years or so.

I'm not quite sure whether a case that applies to content distributed by entities licensed to do so by government (cable, OTA) is 1:1 applicable to relationship between consumer and a private entity.

Nonetheless Microsoft is at the very least accessing Google API's in violation of the terms of service. Now, they could claim monopoly abuse or they could claim that ToS doesn't really apply and they are entitled to do whatever they want, but both of these routes appear to be rather ironically fraught with danger... I'd love to be able to claim that ToS like CAL count doesn't apply once I have my hands on legally purchased Windows Server install media.

I'm pretty sure that Windows phone has a bit more users than just a few hundred. Last I heard almost close to five thousand!

So far it seems that they do have a better product. At least for large chunks of audience that can actually afford it.

And? That was not the parents point. The fact that everybody and a dog are doing shitty, slow and ugly android handsets is nether news, nether surprise. In the high-end of the market Apple/Samsung seems to be about equals, in the $100 market android dominates because barely anybody else bothers with it (you can't compete with 1001 Chinese OEMs hashing out new models every week).

Of course given that the source you cited is 'estimates' and puts Microsoft at 18% while omitting blackberry or Nokia (at low end) altogether raises some credibility questions. Quite large credibility questions.