Android does use the linux kernel and does have some of the GNU stack, but it's not directly comparable to Ubuntu.
I believe that we are going to be using our phones as our desktop computers in the not-too-distant future, and what Ubuntu is doing is one of the first steps to achieve this. Android has tried to do this in the past (Atrix), but the desktop experience was abysmal because the experiences were inconsistent.
I'm very excited to see how this develops, but Canonical is going to need some good endurance to see this to a point where it can compete commercially.
You are correct that there's a VM -- Dalvik is the process virtual machine in Android, and that a common use case is to use Java bytecode and then convert it to Dalvik, but this is a far cry from being "trapped in a Java VM".
In fact, at even the fundamental level, the Java VM is a stack-based machine, while the Dalvik VM is a register-based machine (the merits or criticisms of doing so are beyond the scope of this post; that's a different discussion).
And if the notion of a VM is still utterly offensive, you are welcome to write portions of your Android applications in native code, such as through C or C++, although for many applications there's really no or marginal benefit to doing so.
Actually, a "few bent cops" do mean that all police officers are like that to some degree.
Obviously they aren't all going out and committing crime, but by not policing each other, they are colluding with those who do.
Police simply don't face the same consequences for violent crimes that ordinary citizens do, and that is because of the culture of policing that all police are to some degree responsible for.
When was the last time you heard the officers who are 'doing the best they can' calling for jailtime for fellow officers found to have abused their authority?
> Obviously they aren't all going out and committing crime, but by not policing each other, they are colluding with those who do.
Depends on how you define crime? I see cops who park illegally, speed without turning on sirens, turn on sirens because they don't want to stand at the light, idle their cars for hours at a time, and make illegal right-on-red turns every single day. And guess what? They'll write you a ticket in a second if you did that.
And yes, the fact that they refuse to police each other, as you mention, is the primary cause of this. And of course, we can't police them. That would be a joke, right?
When police officers become more than citizens, when they become things like men in uniform, first responders, etc. then it becomes a problem. They are us. No better and no worse. Until we see them and treat them like us, these problems will just get worse.
On the exact same day as that felon fled the police and crashed a car, millions of ordinary citizens obeyed the law and worked to make the world a better place...
But none of that makes criminals any less of a problem.
And decent cops stopping crime does nothing to lessen the harm done when other cops commit crimes.
Not quite that simple. Google does at least partially own the platform and made a lot of noise about html being a better platform for being open before.
Everybody else just makes a business decision what they need to support. Native, Flash, HTML, browser variations.
For Google this is more of a power play, and a bit of a bait and switch as HTML was sold as being free of those power plays.
Google gives away all their client platforms as open source (i.e. Chrome and Android), so it's hardly a power play when compared with the other options.
True, Chromium and AOSP are open source. I think the point is that Google are playing both games here. They can quite happily compete with the Microsofts and Apples of the world when it comes to power plays, but they also want to see what comes from giving huge amounts of code to the developer community to play with. There are logical, long term business reasons for open-sourcing projects like Chromium, AOSP, Go, V8, WebM etc.
Microsoft will never have a shot at dominating the mobile industry. What I don't understand is your willingness to support a duopoly, which is almost as bad as a monopoly.
I don't see it as at odds with how they market themselves. They position themselves as providing an Open, non-proprietary option as an alternative to monolithic and traditional closed solutions from Apple and Microsoft, and they are delivering on that in the form of Android.
Of course it's evil. Redirecting a user is hostile in nature and was surely done to piss off microsoft. What wouldn't be evil is putting a banner stating that the browser is not supported.
I get that google needs to make money, I'm fine with it, but don't for one minute think they are the good guys anymore. They are as evil as any other public company. Sad but true.
They're the only ones providing an Open Source mobile OS. Without them, we'd have only proprietary solutions controlled by single corporations.
Having put in all this effort to provide an open solution, they need to be somewhat competitive to make it succeed, otherwise it would likely languish the way the Linux desktop has.
They have no obligation to do so. But then why not be honest about refusing service to users of a competing platform, rather than claiming that it's about the technical capabilities of the browser? This is something that was working on WP devices until today and has been intentionally disabled.
There is nothing 'Anti-Competitive' about not providing your free service to customers of your competitor. If people want Google services they can choose Android.
It's worth remembering that Android was developed in the first place to be an Open alternative to prevent Windows phone from taking off. Why would they go to all the trouble of developing Android only to prop up Microsoft.
Of course it's anti-competitive! They took something that was working on a competitor's phone platform and intentionally caused it to stop working. It's probably not illegal, but if it's designed to harm a competitor it is by definition anti-competitive.
Not adding value to your competitor's products for free is simply competitive and part of normal business. "Anti-competitive" is a different thing and means using market power to suppress competition, whereas this move is about intensifying it.
First of all, forget "not adding value to your competitor's product" - this is about removing value that was already there.
Secondly, Google has market power in both the mobile device OS market and the online map market compared to MS, and is trying to leverage its position in the latter to hurt MS in the former. This seems like exactly your stated definition of anti-competitive behavior. How is this "intensifying" competition?
There are multiple players in the map market, Microsoft themselves being one of them. Google are competing against Microsoft by asking customers to choose between their integrated mobile offerings rather than supporting Microsoft by giving them a second maps option for free.
