Some months ago, Apple acquired a music service that I didn’t care about: Lala. I didn’t care because between my personal library in iTunes and on my iPod, Spotify (via proxy), Last.FM, and Hype Machine I was well hydrated for music discovery and appreciation. Lala was famous for its ‘web songs’ model, where you pay a small fraction of the retail price for a song or album in order to stream it repeatedly from its site. Neat, but I’m sceptical of ‘renting music’.
The Web does suck at APIs, and hardware devices, and 3D acceleration. None of those things have anything to do with being a web of information. This essay tries to explain why I disagree so strongly with recent detractors, and why I passionately believe in the web’s true, native architecture: Interlinked information.
The web, with its interconnectedness, happens to be a pretty good tool for distributing content. Applications tend to be tools for manipulating content. So we get web applications: tools for manipulating content that you can find or create on the web. The problem comes when web applications start to bite the hand that feeds, by isolating the content within the application from the rest of the web.
drutil tray eject
The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous “Atlantic triangular trade”, and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism
Cons:
Highly dependent on Google account. For example, Calendar can’t even be used without being logged into a Google account. In a way, you are a just trading a certain amount of Apple lock-in for a certain amount of Google lock-in.
I use a standard IMAP server for email. Gmail and Mail are two separate apps (why?) and the standard mail client is very much a second-class citizen. (Cannot move a message to another folder, for example. It’s just not possible.) A third-party fork of the standard email client (called K-9) offers better IMAP support, along with its own set of weird behaviors, fractured GUI, and regrettable Dr. Who icon.
Andy [Rubin]’s point was simple. Older Android devices that can’t be upgraded to newer versions of the OS or run newer apps are no different than an iPhone from 2007 not being updated to OS 4. It’s not fragmentation – it’s legacy.
According to our sources, this project has been in the works long before Google announced its TV solution