Re: Harmattan?
 

Shhhh...

I'm thinkin' the Nokia brand will be to hard to resist now that they have built a loyal community around Maemo... so I pick door #1. :)

Time to grab that hackmyharmattan.com domain while it is still available. :D

Re: Harmattan?
 

Isn't there ethical issues about location based advertisement (I am not talking about legal). Something that tracks your location and suggest things based on your purchase history or demographics. Just because we can clone a hamster/dog hybrd doesn't mean we should. Nokia seems to be proud of its social contributions, "greener planet" stuff, then why start down this dark path. I can only imagine what AT&T wireless would do with this. Atleast if I get a commercial on my cable tv programming I can fast forward through it or switch channels, its not constantly taking up my screen space and reminding me its time to buy more beer.

Re: Harmattan?
 

As long as it suggests these things to you alone and not to a bunch of corporate suits high in the clouds, why is there an ethical issue?

You mean we shouldn't? No way... Where is fun in that? :)

This is called "buzzword compliance". As long as both "greener planet" and "location based advertising" are current buzzwords, there is no logical conflict here in following both.

Morale: Do not try being a miser, buy a real, unsubsidized device. At the end of the day, you will pay about the same or less and avoid that terrible feeling of being sodomized by a corporate entity.

Re: Harmattan?
 

they never claimed the UI would be community developed, did they?

i think it's a reasonable thing to do in this market: build upon a strong, free software platform, but put something on top that sets you apart from the others that use the same platform as a base.



what's much more interesting, though:

imagine there really is a subsidized version that has a place for ads hardwired to the homescreen. what does this mean for the future of alternatives like debian and mer on maemo devices?
wouldn't it mean that they'd need to block any possibility to boot into an alternate OS or else consumers would simply avoid having the ad by using mer instead of maemo?

this would be more annoying than the ad itself, because it might lead to a design decision that affects both the subsidized and the non-subsidized variants.

Re: Harmattan?
 

That's called 'pulling an Archos' in short :D I just hope the amount of effort invested and possibilities of a fairly open OS make it clear to Nokia big people doing something like that would be shooting their whole tablet division in the foot with a mighty big caliber weapon.

Re: Harmattan?
 

That's^ where I was going when I first asked the rhetorical... From what I have seen of the North American market, Carriers would insist that customers couldn't easily boot into an alternate OS before they "jumped on board".

Re: Harmattan?
 

Also known as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differe...on_(economics)

And that's what brought us things like a buggy network manager that only nokia can fix, as its closed source, and other pesky bits...

Sometimes i can sense what made RMS go do what he did...

Re: Harmattan?
 

And the UI for Maemo 5 indeed is not community developed. The issue (on my mind) is to what extent it reflects Diablo UI and/or community input, which we will only know upon release. I am prepared to be disappointed and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

Yes, but not to say that some smart people can't jail break it. Of course, subsidized devices (which most of us hate) will expand the range of Maemo 5 devices. (afaik, Maemo 5 won't be openly licensed for the asking on non-Nokia devices so (even though it may be open as in hackable, etc.) there would otherwise be a bit of a hardware lock to Maemo devices).

I'm not following though how that necessitates a design decision that affects the non-subsidized version.

Re: Harmattan?
 

http://liqbase.net/liq.20090522_123535.lib.scr.png

you dont need to wait for harmattan to get a funky cool new adverts ;)

Re: Harmattan?
 

the design decision could be to change the startup process in a way that provides no more hooks for a boot menu. for example. or use some of the nice and well-known "no open driver"-tricks that prevent you from running another OS...

if they do this, i guess it wouldn't be worth the effort to change these parts of maemo for the non-subsidized devices. - the number of people who care about being able to run alternate OSs is just too small, isn't it?

it's just a thought, though, something that could happen. (if this ad-based thing is true at all...) i'm not saying they'd need to do it and there'd be no other way.