Andriod not the only open source mobile os out there now

[Tero Pesonen]

On Wed, 2010-02-10 at 08:21 -0500, Michael Haney wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 6:57 AM, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
> > He must live in a community where they all have iPhones. /me goes
> > looking for a community that only uses N900 Linux phones.
> >
> 
> This being a college town you are absolutely right.  Almost everyone
> around here has one.
> 
> Actually, if I could afford it I'd go with a Palm Pre or a Nexus One.
> My friend has a Palm Pre and he loves it.  He wants an iPhone, but has
> an intense hatred for AT&T.  The guy is a huge Mac fan, he owns two
> MBPs and is considering a purchase of a Mac Pro desktop.
> 
> The one thing that struck me about the Opera announcement is that we
> all know Apple would never allow a competing browser onto the iPhone.
>  If Micro$oft did that the FTC would be beating down Steve Balmer's
> door with guns blazing.  Its an abuse of monopoly power.  Again, its a
> stunt to draw people's attention away from the iPhone and towards its
> competitors.  The iPhone may be the most "dominant" of the
> smart-phones, statistically speaking, but in the hearts and minds of
> the people it is. 

Smartphone market share is normally not calculated by product-line
brands (iPhone) but by the companies' brands that represent the
smartphone product lines (Apple, RIM, SonyEricsson, Nokia, etc.) Some
companies have a single product line or brand  (Apple), some have many
(Nokia.) Nokia sells more smartphones than Apple. iPhone products cannot
be by any math dominant. Just because Apple always bundles products
behind a single brand (e.g. iPod) and American journalists talk about
how much *the* iPod has sold, doesn't mean they the company behind the
product sells any more than they actually do. Compare: How many
distribution installs has "Ubuntu" had vs. how many has Ubuntu 9.10 had?
Obviously, Ubuntu dominates against Ubuntu 9.10. 9.10 seems like a
failure... we should all start using Ubuntu!


>  There's a lot of attention and praise lavished on
> the iPhone.  

This is true in the North America. Where I live, people do not know what
iPhone is. They do know what Nokia Communicators are, because every
self-respecting business and IT professional carries one, no matter how
ludicrously expensive they are.

> People treat it like its the "Jesus Phone" and can bring
> about World Peace.

This is definitely true to North American "journalism." No business
magazine, for example, can survive without their own Apple "expert" who
writes a weekly column and interviews all Apple products (always very
positively, of course, because no one wants to anger Apple fans, who
always seem to make a loud and somewhat sizeable portion of any
publication's readers.) Kudos to IT magazines, on-line publications
etc. Steve Jobs owns the US media. But he doesn't own the world
yet.     

> The point is, Opera is doing this to demonstrate the iPhone's biggest
> weakness.

This might well be.

> 
> Apple itself.
> 
> They treat iPhone developers like dirt, they're in a playground like
> spat with Adobe over Flash, and they have an over-inflated opinion of
> how big they are in the mobile market.  Apple have done things that
> would have gotten Micro$oft broken up like AT&T was in the 70s.  If
> Steve Jobs thinks the web is going to obediently roll over and
> immediately dump Flash for HTML5 because he refuses to allow it on the
> iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad he's delusional.
> 
> What the hell is so fucking special about Apple that they can thumb
> their nose at Anti-Trust Laws without the FTC going medieval on them?

Ssssh! Don't talk so loud! There may be Apple fans about. They would
lynch you if they heard someone speaking ill of the holy corporation. 

> 
> I want to fucking know!
>

Steve is good at manipulating. He's a marketing man. He's made it an art
form. Yes, he could sell tons of iSnow in Greenland in the winter. A
cubic meter costs 599€. There's an Apple logo on it. And a blinking
light that tells the cube is on. It has a battery you cannot replace.
It's design is naive, even childish. But it is cool because Steve said
so. You can't do a shit with it; but it sure is damn cool. Walter
Mossberg will be reviewing a pre-release version of *the* iSnow next
week. He got it directly from Jobs who tapped Walter's head like the
good puppy he is. He thinks it is glorious -- *the* iSnow, that is.

Microsoft is thinking of making their own snow product, having seen how
much dough Apple is reaping by selling snow. The MS version is quite a
bit more functional and useful than the iSnow, but it has a stupid name
(Windows Live Snow Polygon 2010 Home Beta) and it is not *the* Windows
Live Snow Polygon 2010 Home but just Windows Live Snow Polygon 2010
Home, So it ain't very cool. Tech journalists and bloggers (the oracles
of our time) have called it "dull" and "unexciting" but "rather good if
you just need to get things done instead of showing off." The first
service pack is due in the first half of 2011 and bloggers near MS have
revealed there's a version with the PROFESSIONAL moniker out soon. The
professional version differs from the home version by having a higher
price tag and a different packaging.

Richard Stallman has also published a free (as in all forms of freedom)
snow product. It's called SNOW (SNOW is not snow) but you have to
compile it from the source and it is quite difficult to use even for a
hacker. It has been ported to Windows by project WinSNOW (you need GCC
and MingW and... list cut). It integrates nicely with Emacs, though, and
you can program it with Lisp. Richard thinks everyone should get one
instead of Apple's iSnow, because the iSnow uses a proprietary protocol
between the blinking light and the battery. (and that's all it has,
cause that's cool.) 

Greenpeace has criticised Apple for including a non-changeable
lithium-ion battery in a pile of snow. Apple fans would have launched a
DoS attack on Greenpeace (poor tree huggers didn't know better to just
shut up) had they not been spending all their bandwidth downloading 1GB
OSX security fix packages every day for the past month. Packages that do
not show there are any security holes anywhere Steve's Midas's touch has
blessed, but rather packages that elegantly evidence how much Apple
cares about its users by improving its operating system for *free* for
everyone's benefit. Take that, Microsoft! And that the said security
holes have been fixed months ago on Ubuntu, only shows Linux users are
un-cool and un-creative (*definitely* excessively uncreative), almost
Penguin-like creeps. They do not even understand you need to pay for
snow to be cool. This is because one needs to be at college, living on
daddy's money, buying useless Apple crap with daddy's money, and having
a creative mind and attitute towards the world around, for that to
enlighten.

OK, I gotta continue working.

Tero Pesonen


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