We're talking about the place where electron microscopes, CAT scanners, and several more of the most amazing medtech breakthroughs in history have been made. *Nobody* is interested in setting up shop there except Boots, Capital One, Experian and Games Workshop?? Makes me wonder why...
It's a planned economy coupled with cargo cult economics ("if you build it they will come".)
It also has a GDP nearly that of the UK, despite having 25 million less inhabitants. To compare, the UK is £1,278.2 billion in debt with an unemployment rate of 8%. Tech is also a growth industry which the UK needs since it is now too dependent on financial services, a sector that hasn't been doing especially well. That said I don't think this scheme will succeed but you can see why they would want it to.
That wouldn't displace enough poor people.
Of course once you actually build your products there your IP will also "disappear".
So if it's so obvious why hasn't any other company shown off its prototypes, like Apple has going back all the way to a 2002 iPad prototype ? If it's so obvious why nearly all of the tech world scoff at both the iPhone (eg. “The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks." - Bloomberg) and the iPad ("little more than a giant iPhone." - Wired, and "In the end, I think that the iPad will eventually be regarded [as] product that Jobs should have left on the drawing boards." - TechRepublic.) when they were first released ? In the case of the iPhone much of the ridicule was even specifically aimed at the touchscreen interface, the very thing which you now claim was obvious : "it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine" - Steve Ballmer. Hindsight is always 20/20.
They were already losing money, the Fire is (was?) a loss leader for Amazon. Hard to drop the price if you're already selling at a loss.
If you didn't want to deal with the bandwidth to upgrade Gnome, then why did you install/use it?
Classic case of blaming the user. On any other modern OS the user doesn't need to take this kind of nonsense under consideration.
BTW when I do use *BSD or Linux desktops I'm more of an XFCE man.
Mac and iOS just hide all the details from you. DLL and dependency hell are still there, they just are Apple's problem, not yours. I simply prefer control over simplicity but for most consumers they prefer simplicity. Thank the magic sky wizard there are more than two closed-source choices for those of use than want to DIY.
In OSX the details that need to be hidden are hidden because most people buy computers to get something done not to fiddle with the innards. That control you talk of is mostly illusionary. It's like muscle car owners: sure they may have "complete control" over their car's engine, being able to tweak every little thing but it comes at the expense of usability and practicality. In the end it's masturbatory, it serves no other purpose than its own sake.
No it's not. Windows broken security was. OS X hasn't got an official package manager and has had about the same problems with malware as Linux has had, that is to say close to none.
Which is precisely why people are upset that a patent was granted for the "featureless" design. It creates a patent that is way too generic/broad.
Simplicity isn't easy, it just looks easy. That it took apple to wipe away all that cruft is evidence enough of that. If it truly were generic someone would have done it before.
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
E.F. Schumacher
Nah I just thought that quote was so ridiculously out of proportion I'd inject some reality. After all we're talking about a company winning a court case before a jury of its peers in what is still a democratic nation. To turn that into "a people who give in to tyrants" is more than a little hyperbolic. That I got to rag on the dutch was just a happy coincidence, though as you rightfully point out my people sure aren't any better.
You do realize that all those hundreds of megs worth of libraries also exist on Windows and OS X, they just ship in the box with the OS?
Yep, and on OS X developers use mostly the OS provided libraries while on Linux they pull in all kinds of obscure stuff (how many friggin' XML parsers need to be installed on a system ?)
(which, coincidentally, is why you can have Linux without any GUI at all, but not the other two)
OSX without a GUI exists, it's called Darwin. There have been several implementations even, people just don't care about it.
And, of course, there are plenty of Linux distros that also include all that stuff in the box. If you install a typical desktop app from a package in Ubuntu, it's unlikely to drag in more than a couple smallish libraries - and those are usually where the core functionality lives (i.e. app is just a GUI shell over a library).
Until you have Gnome 3.0.1b453 or whatever and your app wants 3.0.1b567.
hmm
"Where I get this stuff" is an overview of reality. Please do not politic by omitting key numbers needed for scale and perspective, like Samsungs smartphone sales are currently $40B and rising with high margin. Parts sales are not only smaller, but have lower margin.
Unless Samsung wishes to forgo the consumer market (no indication of this), they need to fight for it, and sacrifice the parts market if need be. Better to use those parts in their own products.
So they are going to destroy a market worth a quarter (or more) of their own in the hopes that iPhone owners are going to buy their phones ? It just doesn't make sense. I'm also sure that destroying a competitor by price fixing or refusing to supply them is A) illegal in most of the western world B) would be frowned upon by all of Samsung's other customers who might start looking at alternative sources.
Any number of patents by other companies show similar drawings. Eg. : LG television receiver (rectangle with kickstand), Nokia Handset (rounded body with 2 buttons), etc. This is about the look of the device in general, not rounded corners specifically. Of course people have jumped to that conclusion because Apple devices on the outside are famously featureless (spartan in appearance) which in a technical drawing ends up looking like a rounded rectangle. This is why in the court case the jury did not rule exclusively based on the patent but was also shown a lot of the prototypes and design documents.
There are also patents on televisions that look like Sony's, handsets that look like Nokia's, tablets that look like Samsung's, etc., etc. It's industry SOP.
Friction is a drag.
