My gf bought the latest edition of Guitar Hero, I think it's called Warriors of Rock. How can I put this mildly? The song selection is simply garbage. Maybe they used up all the good songs in the previous editions of Guitar Hero, I don't know. But I'm positive this is the reason it had such poor sales.
I have a feeling that Nokia is actually two companies when it comes to OS development. On one side you have the Maemo/Meego guys that are relatively new and up to even two years ago were an insignificant part of the company. On the other.you have the old school Symbian guys that have been there for years, and who obviously do not want to lose their bread and butter by ditching their aging OS. So they chose to keep improving Symbian, hoping they will make it relevant and competitive. They might have had a shot if not for Android moving so quickly ahead.
Anyway, I posted in the previous Nokia thread from a few days ago, and there's no point in repeating everything I said there. But I definitely agree with your assessment of the N900. I still have mine and I use it as my only phone, pda, ebook reader, mp3 player and netbook. But it's not the hardware that is amazing, since a year and a half later it's starting to show its age. It's in the level of customization, since the thing is running a full version of Linux without any restrictions at all.
That's where Nokia should have pumped out more devices, even if the software wasn't perfect. I'd be very tempted to buy another Maemo/Meego device tomorrow if it had current 1Ghz+ dual core CPUs, more RAM and a slightly better camera.
Honestly, the best thing Nokia could do would be to start putting out Android devices. I know they hate that idea, having poured so much into Qt, S60 and such but it's just the situation they are in. If they don't do it then they're going down in flames like all those other old businesses that couldn't keep up when the market went against them. The iPhone and Android markets are growing by leaps and bounds with thousands of new developers pouring in like crazy.
Nokia puts together superior hardware but they're not going to last unless they realize they have lost the OS/software war.
I completely forgot to mention Symbian, even though I used it on my E71. From I remember, it worked very well for devices without touchscreens, but it felt dated and some of the interface and navigation choices were just silly. One in particular was that sometimes closing an application would actually minimize it. A few hours later you'd wonder why the battery drained completely. Checking the task manager would show a whole bunch of applications happily churning in the background.
Nokia went on to invest a lot of money and resources into Symbian, but even their latest version is AWFUL when compared to Maemo, Android or iOS. I think Symbian is the reason Nokia is in so much trouble right now. They chose to keep developing that clunker of an OS along with Maemo/MeeGo, unwilling to break free from the few legacy applications available for it. Obviously applications are important, but both Apple and Google proved that within a couple of years, with enough developers, you can have hundreds of thousands of them.
Nokia should have stopped all development of Symbian, and should have invested all their resources behind Maemo/MeeGo.
I used to be the biggest supporter of Nokia's Maemo/MeeGo OS. Except for the N770, I owned every single Maemo device they released (N800, N810, N900) and I loved them. They were true pocket computers running full, unlocked versions of Debian.
I still own the N900, which at the time it came out, was miles ahead of anything else available on the market in terms of features, customization, and hardware. It was amazing to have full desktop (not mobile) skype connectivity built into the phone. Just connect to wifi or 3G and make calls to any other Skype computer or N900. Full (not web) browsing enabled by default. Flash 9 preinstalled. But it is almost a year and a half later, and in the meantime Nokia has not released any new Maemo/MeeGo hardware, and only 1 major update to the N900 firmware. Even that update only fixed minor bugs and added the QT libraries.
In the meantime, Android went through at least 3 major revisions, and there are a multitude of devices to fit any need and budget. And now it matches pretty much all the features that made the N900 special. The worst part? Nokia hasn't even announced ANY MeeGo devices, let alone released them. They may still do it, but I think it's too little too late.
As a Canadian with a Russian girlfriend and friends, I have been made aware of Russian politics to a greater extent that I really cared for.:) Regardless, there seems to be a consensus among Russians on this side of the pond that Medvedev is actually working for Putin. Also most expect that once Medvedev will complete his presidential terms, Putin will run again and win.
Ah, but Iceland chose not to bail out their own banks because a very large part, if not a majority, of the investors in those banks were British. Made perfect sense not to sink their economy to recover British savings.
Any first year psych student can tell you that. But sometimes correlation is standing there waving a huge flag, shouting "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" You'd have to be blind to ignore it, and in this case I think correlation is almost equivalent to causation.
However here is another explanation, if correlation is not enough. People watch Fox news, and they get misinformed. Then they watch other stations, and the new information contradicts what they saw previously on Fox news. Since people with formed opinions generally seek information confirming their beliefs, they turn back to their original sources. And so people watch Fox news, and they get further misinformed.
The knowledge about Obama is the dead giveaway. I would venture a guess that more than 63% of Fox news viewers were watching that station before Obama even appeared in the political spotlight about 4 years ago. So they either never received information about his birth place, or they were given false information by Fox news.
What you are saying about contingency fee lawyers is mostly true. They do not get paid until the case is settled in favour of their client. In most people's conception this means "My case settled for $100 000, the lawyer gets between 20-30% and I get the other 70-80%.
However at least in Canada the is one HUGE issue. The matter of fees and disbursements. Things that fall under this category can range from photocopies (25 cents each), courier fees ($50-100 each), travel expenses (hundreds of dollars) to medical reports (thousands of dollars).
In some cases the lawyer can negotiate a deal where their fees and disbursements are paid by the defendant. If the case is very strong, that is what usually happens, because the settlement is large enough that it doesn't matter anyway. What is an extra $30,000 to an insurance company that will pay $500,000 or $1mil anyway?
However, if the case is weak or the damage is not as extensive, these fees and disbursements come out of the client's pocket AFTER the layer took their cut already. So in the first example, the case settles for $100,000, the lawyer gets 30% PLUS up to $20-30,000, and the client only ends up with $40-50,000. Not nearly as rosy as most people think.
I am not a programmer, so I have no idea which platform is easier to develop for, but having owned every single Maemo device Nokia has shipped (N770, N800, N810 and now N900), I loved them.
The N900 is by far the most tweakable device I've ever used, and the most open. How many smartphones out there can run a custom kernel that allows overclocking, shh-ing into the phone, and editing text config files? How about upgrading, downgrading and replacing individual packages?
The community built around these 4 generations of devices is fairly small, but very dedicated. At least it was before the Meego announcement. Since then quite a few developers have left, including the creator of rootsh (if you've done ANYTHING custom on the N900, the first step is installing rootsh).
Nokia should have banked on this community. They should have kept Symbian for the lower end, mass produced phones, and push Maemo at the high end. They have been promising this for a year now, but I only see Symbian phones coming out.
It saddens me when my overclocked N900 has almost identical specs to the high end iPhone 4, yet nobody pays any attention to it because it's a year old already. Developers do not want to waste time with old phones, they want to know there is something else in the pipeline that people will buy and run apps on.
I used to own a Vaio SR490 that took a small bump when I crashed my motorcycle. It still worked just fine, but one of the screen hinge caps broke and the DC plug was exposed.
I wanted to replace it, and the cheapest I found that little piece online was $40+shipping. Cheapest I found it from Sony? $60+tax+shipping. It's a small piece of molded plastic, that even after manufacture, storage, etc cannot cost more than a few dollars.
I could have continued using the laptop as is, but it was bugging the hell out of me. So I sold it. That is how you get consumers to replace gear. What Sony did not count on was me buying an Asus instead of a Sony just for spite.:)
In my case it stored all the information in its own database and then cleaned any trace of former tags from the music files themselves. I said that people reading my post will start replying "It cannot happen", "I've used every version of iTunes since the dawn of time and none did that to me".
Well, it did happen dammit! I was there, and I'm not a computer n00b, even though I'm posting this from Seamonkey running on Win7.:) Even if losing the id3 tags was a result of a bug in my particular build of iTunes and the previous as well as next versions worked as intended it still doesn't change things.
Unless this was a feature of a very old version of iTunes, or your files were marked read only, you were certainly mistaken iTunes saves id3 information directly into your mp3 file as well as an xml file and a binary file. The only time something isn't directly written into your mp3 file is if you use the "get album artwork" option. It saves the artwork into a seperate cache folder
Right. I was mistaken. That's why I spent a few hours editing the tags in iTunes, and then I thought to myself "You know what would be REALLY cool? If I did it all over again."
There is the principle here that a song is a self-contained unit, it knows where it belongs all on its own. If you took hundred songs from my iTunes Library, copied them all into one single directory, and imported them into your iTunes Library, everything would end up exactly where it belongs.
You are correct with regards to the actual mp3 files. They should contain artist, album, song and track number information. That is why I accepted the need to edit my music collection. But that still doesn't change the fact that iTunes deleted existing ID3 tags completely. Those ID3 tags were gone, wiped clean, destroyed, NOT THERE ANYMORE.
Whether it may have been a bug in that version of iTunes or all versions of iTunes behave the same way I do not know. And I will NEVER find out, because I will never allow iTunes within 10ft of any music files I have.
I briefly owned a 2nd generation iPod Nano when they were brand new, and of course it insisted I install iTunes in order to transfer music to it. I installed it, uploaded some songs, and found out that Apple insists on ignoring folder structure when organizing music playlists. Since all my mp3s came from random sources, the id3 tags were a mess, but up to that point I did not care. Every computer and mp3 player I had used to that point was fine reading folders first with Artist_name/Album_name/track_number_-_song_name being the default sort.
Apple just HAD to be different. It was using just file names and id3 tags to sort songs in playlists, so "Unknown Artist", "Doors" and "The Doors" were all different, even though on my PC they were all under the same folder. This was annoying beyond belief, but I wanted to fix the id3 tags anyway at some point.
So I embarked on the gargantuan task of editing the id3 tags in my entire music collection, about 90Gb at the time, using iTunes. It wasn't as horrible as I thought, since iTunes does have batch id3 tag processing. At first everything was fine, all my songs were nicely organized both in iTunes and iPod.
Then a few months later I decided to sell the iPod Nano and just use a cellphone as an mp3 player. Since I was only using iTunes to sync the Nano and play the mp3s, and I always liked foobar better anyway, I uninstalled it. HUGE MISTAKE!!!!!
It turned out that iTunes wiped out the id3 tags from the songs and stored them somewhere else, because when I loaded the mp3s in foobar not a single one still had their tags. They were wiped clean! I posted this before and people said it must have been a mistake on my part. But I promise you guys, every single file in my music collection did not have an id3 tag. Verified with several media players on several computers.
After that I swore never to buy another product that requires iTunes to function. I'd probably be tempted by an iPhone 4 once my Nokia N900 breaks down, but since I have to use iTunes, it won't happen...
Much appreciated.:) The only problem with having all clips on one page though is that if you don't want to finish watching one of them, they'll still finish buffering in the background after you've paused it and moved on to the next one. Not a problem on a desktop or a laptop, but on my N900 this can be a bit of an issue.
I have had several Palms since the early pilot days, and have had just the opposite results, NONE have failed. I stopped with palm products with a T/X and eventually switched over to a blackberry due to work compatibility. Now its an iphone since i was able to ditch that evil BB.
Still love the T/X but it pretty much is what it is, nothing new will come down the pike for it ( oh, and the missing microphone what were they thinking?!?! ) so it was time to move forward. ( thus the apple product )
My experience is by no means exhaustive, obviously there were Palms that never broke down. Overall their reliability was not bad, but the cheap plastic housings, low res screens with THICK screen fonts, antiquated launcher, and generally a lack of features made them feel like sub par alternatives to Sony Clies. It was almost as if Palm OS was created by Sony, and Palm was just a licensee that didn't quite know how to implement it or design the hardware. You should really look at a TX side by side with a Clie TH55 or better yet an NX80, and you'd know what I mean.
And that's also the feeling I get when I compare the Pre to the iPhone or to my N900. It's cheap, cheap, cheap.
I started with the Palm Pilot 5000, and over the past 10 years I've never been without a Palm OS PDA. Just to prove that I am as familiar with Palm OS devices, here's a short list of the ones I've owned for at least a few months at a time: Palm Pilot 5000, Palm Vx, Clie SJ30, Palm m505, four Palm TX, Clie NR70, two Clie NX70 and three Clie TH55. The reason there are so many duplicates on the list is because I was buying and selling them at a small profit.
For the most part the hardware was reliable, but the ONLY devices to completely fail on me were the Palm ones. The battery died on my Vx, and replacing it was impossible without butchering it (disassembly instructions involved using a heat gun to melt the glue) or spending a lot of money to have it replaced by Palm with a refurbished unit. The touch screen on one TX stopped responding, and another TX stopped charging. Every Clie I've ever owned on the other hand was still running, no matter how abused it was. I bought a Clie NX73 off Ebay, and when it arrived, the hinge was completely worn out, the casing was beaten up everywhere, the screen was scratched BUT it was working perfectly. In terms of features the Clies were also far ahead of any Palm device. They had high resolution color screens, memory card slots, wifi, BT before anything from Palm, and they had MUCH better build quality and materials to boot.
When Palm announced the Pre I was really excited, because WebOS looked amazing and the hardware had great specs. Backwards compatibility with PalmOS apps was also a HUGE bonus. But the anticipation lasted precisely until I got to actually hold a Pre in my hand. I absolutely, positively hated it! The shiny plastic shell was cheap and scratch prone (just like the TX). The sliding keyboard was awkward, cramped and had a raised lip around it that feelt unfinished. Overall the Pre was a big disappointment. Not a bad device, but worth half what Palm was charging for it.
At this point I was really hoping someone will license the WebOS and design a GOOD smartphone to run it. That never happened and probably never will, since all manufacturers went with Android. In the meantime I picked up a Nokia N900 and I'm not sorry I did. I can still run my PalmOS apps through Garnett, and having a full Linux computer at my fingertips is simply amazing.
Has Microsoft done anything, ever, on purpose to break compatibility with older or competitive software? (Apple does this about every week, BTW.)
You either are too young to remember, or you have a short memory.
Microsoft went out of their way to maintain compatibility with their own older software. But until recently they always tried to block competition intentionally. Although Windows 3.1 ran perfectly on DR-DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS, it was returning an non-fatal error message, in effect convincing users there was something wrong with DR-DOS. Eventually Novell gave up on DR-DOS and sold it to Caldera (now called SCO). The ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court sometime in 2000 for $155 million, with Novell and Caldera sharing the profits. This is just one example.
When they couldn't outright deny competitors access, Microsoft's policy was embrace, extend, extinguish. Internet Explorer 4 and 5 were NOT standards compliant. I remember running Mozilla M18 and encountering sites that would only render in IE properly, that is if Mozilla wasn't blocked outright. How is that not purposely blocking competing software? Only after FireFox started gaining traction did Microsoft release standards compliant browsers.
The point is today Microsoft is a better company because the competition forced them to open up and listen to their clients. Remove competitive pressure and I promise you they'll revert to their old policies.
I am getting at least 1 day for a charge, usually 2 days. BUT here's how I use it:
- 1-2h worth of phone conversations over GSM with a BT headset. - 1-2h a day as an ebook reader. Fbreader is AWSOME, between my old N800, N810 and now N900, I think I read 100 books using these devices. - Constantly connected to WiFi (where available, which is almost everywhere for me) or 3G, checking my gmail accounts every 5 mins throughout the day, being available on skype, etc.
The difference between 1 day and 2 day charges is whether or not I play movies, use the FM transmitter or the GPS. Streaming flash clips off the web through WiFi or 3G will take a LOT of battery life. Same goes for using the FM transmitter to broadcast music to my car stereo, or the GPS but that's in my car where I have a charger.
Your post has made me curious and I'm watching now the review of the N900 right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvPTBwEg5UA Now, I dunno if my perception is screwed or something but the apps on there take 2-4 seconds to launch and the touchscreen does lag tiny little bit in some of them. On the other hand the apps on the vilified 3gs load - as far as my perception is concerned - within 1-2 seconds.
The latest N900 firmware resolved a LOT of issues. Not sure what firmware the review phone is using, but looking at his theme, it's an older one. My N900 with firmware 3.2010.02-8.002 released about a month ago loads up ALL apps faster than in the review. Same goes for the touchscreen lag. The next firmware, due to be released in a couple of weeks will improve things even further.
But that's not all.:) The N900 also gets faster as you use it. After a cold boot the RAM has 100Mb used, but after loading all sorts of apps it goes up to 153Mb and stays there. Those extra 50Mb contain cashing data for all your apps. I just tried every app I could think of: Communications (SMS and IM), Firefox, Contacts, Phone, Media Player (not MediaBox), Disk Usage, battery-eye, Settings, Application Manager, File Manager, Xterm, PDF Reader, Email. Every single one loaded up instantly, in less than 1 sec.
The only offender is MediaBox, because it insists on scanning your entire device for music, movies, etc. BTW, the N900 can play regular AVI movies without dropping frames or losing sound sync, AND it can output to any TV. I watched 9 (the entire animation movie) full screen on my HD TV the other day.:))
And I NEVER need to reboot my N900, it's rock solid. Even if the first time you start the apps it takes as long as on the iPhone, after 10 mins of use it's much faster.
Except that the iPhone does run Apple apps in the back ground. The OS has a number of things running to be able to receive a call, keep it touch with the tower, update the battery icon, the signal bars, etc. Even though 3rd party apps can't run in the back ground, the iPhone is running several tasks all the time. Its just those task were all written by apple. I haven't seen the N900, so I can't speak to the speed difference.
Well olddotter, the N900 has to perform all the phone related tasks you've listed as well. So your point doesn't apply.
I've had my Nokia N900 for a couple of months now, and for those unaware, most of the specs are identical to the iPhone 3Gs 32Gb. Well, except that it has a much higher resolution screen, a keyboard, a real GPS, an FM transmitter and a microUSB port for data and charging. But the CPU/GPU and amount of storage are the same, except that you can also add a microSD card to the N900. But now on to the most important difference to the 3Gs. I've used both my N900 and a 3Gs, and the 3Gs just feels sluggish, while having half the functionality.
Flipping home screens on the N900, regardless of how many icons and widgets it's running is smooth, with no clipping. Even with half a dozen apps running in the background, the UI remains equally fast (several instances of the Firefox, Application Manager, Communication app, Contacts app, Skype, MediaBox, battery-eye, conky, etc). Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier. It's not a large difference, but keep in mind the hardware is identical and the iPhone has NO applications running in the background.
The N900 also starts up applications faster, in most cases instantaneously. Start up times do increase progressively after about 3-4 large apps are already loaded and actually doing stuff in the background (Firefox loading up pages, Application Manager checking for updates, MediaBox playing music). But many utilities that only refresh while in the foreground do not have any impact at all (Conky, battery-eye, disk usage, etc). In contrast, the 3Gs takes a couple of seconds to load up pretty much every app I tried, regardless of how limited its functionality is, and complex apps take even longer.
Once the apps are running, they are roughly equally fast on both the N900 and the 3Gs. But as I stated above, the N900 may be running several apps in the background, and the foreground apps do not slow down at all.
I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees. The iPhone OS takes much more resources to run than Maemo or Android, and the iPhone single tasking is a way of masking it. Of course this is speculation since except for the basic Apple apps, nobody managed run more than one app at the same time on the iPhone. And I'm sure those Apple apps are optimized and tweaked to hook into the OS and stay loaded at all times. Most likely the 4G will have a faster processor and more RAM, and will compensate for the OS shortcomings through brute force.
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And the first one is Episode IV.
My gf bought the latest edition of Guitar Hero, I think it's called Warriors of Rock. How can I put this mildly? The song selection is simply garbage. Maybe they used up all the good songs in the previous editions of Guitar Hero, I don't know. But I'm positive this is the reason it had such poor sales.
I have a feeling that Nokia is actually two companies when it comes to OS development. On one side you have the Maemo/Meego guys that are relatively new and up to even two years ago were an insignificant part of the company. On the other.you have the old school Symbian guys that have been there for years, and who obviously do not want to lose their bread and butter by ditching their aging OS. So they chose to keep improving Symbian, hoping they will make it relevant and competitive. They might have had a shot if not for Android moving so quickly ahead.
Anyway, I posted in the previous Nokia thread from a few days ago, and there's no point in repeating everything I said there. But I definitely agree with your assessment of the N900. I still have mine and I use it as my only phone, pda, ebook reader, mp3 player and netbook. But it's not the hardware that is amazing, since a year and a half later it's starting to show its age. It's in the level of customization, since the thing is running a full version of Linux without any restrictions at all.
That's where Nokia should have pumped out more devices, even if the software wasn't perfect. I'd be very tempted to buy another Maemo/Meego device tomorrow if it had current 1Ghz+ dual core CPUs, more RAM and a slightly better camera.
Honestly, the best thing Nokia could do would be to start putting out Android devices. I know they hate that idea, having poured so much into Qt, S60 and such but it's just the situation they are in. If they don't do it then they're going down in flames like all those other old businesses that couldn't keep up when the market went against them. The iPhone and Android markets are growing by leaps and bounds with thousands of new developers pouring in like crazy.
Nokia puts together superior hardware but they're not going to last unless they realize they have lost the OS/software war.
I completely forgot to mention Symbian, even though I used it on my E71. From I remember, it worked very well for devices without touchscreens, but it felt dated and some of the interface and navigation choices were just silly. One in particular was that sometimes closing an application would actually minimize it. A few hours later you'd wonder why the battery drained completely. Checking the task manager would show a whole bunch of applications happily churning in the background.
Nokia went on to invest a lot of money and resources into Symbian, but even their latest version is AWFUL when compared to Maemo, Android or iOS. I think Symbian is the reason Nokia is in so much trouble right now. They chose to keep developing that clunker of an OS along with Maemo/MeeGo, unwilling to break free from the few legacy applications available for it. Obviously applications are important, but both Apple and Google proved that within a couple of years, with enough developers, you can have hundreds of thousands of them.
Nokia should have stopped all development of Symbian, and should have invested all their resources behind Maemo/MeeGo.
I used to be the biggest supporter of Nokia's Maemo/MeeGo OS. Except for the N770, I owned every single Maemo device they released (N800, N810, N900) and I loved them. They were true pocket computers running full, unlocked versions of Debian.
I still own the N900, which at the time it came out, was miles ahead of anything else available on the market in terms of features, customization, and hardware. It was amazing to have full desktop (not mobile) skype connectivity built into the phone. Just connect to wifi or 3G and make calls to any other Skype computer or N900. Full (not web) browsing enabled by default. Flash 9 preinstalled. But it is almost a year and a half later, and in the meantime Nokia has not released any new Maemo/MeeGo hardware, and only 1 major update to the N900 firmware. Even that update only fixed minor bugs and added the QT libraries.
In the meantime, Android went through at least 3 major revisions, and there are a multitude of devices to fit any need and budget. And now it matches pretty much all the features that made the N900 special. The worst part? Nokia hasn't even announced ANY MeeGo devices, let alone released them. They may still do it, but I think it's too little too late.
As a Canadian with a Russian girlfriend and friends, I have been made aware of Russian politics to a greater extent that I really cared for. :) Regardless, there seems to be a consensus among Russians on this side of the pond that Medvedev is actually working for Putin. Also most expect that once Medvedev will complete his presidential terms, Putin will run again and win.
Will we be able to find his home planet now that Betelgeuse will turn supernova?
Ah, but Iceland chose not to bail out their own banks because a very large part, if not a majority, of the investors in those banks were British. Made perfect sense not to sink their economy to recover British savings.
Any first year psych student can tell you that. But sometimes correlation is standing there waving a huge flag, shouting "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" You'd have to be blind to ignore it, and in this case I think correlation is almost equivalent to causation.
However here is another explanation, if correlation is not enough. People watch Fox news, and they get misinformed. Then they watch other stations, and the new information contradicts what they saw previously on Fox news. Since people with formed opinions generally seek information confirming their beliefs, they turn back to their original sources. And so people watch Fox news, and they get further misinformed.
The knowledge about Obama is the dead giveaway. I would venture a guess that more than 63% of Fox news viewers were watching that station before Obama even appeared in the political spotlight about 4 years ago. So they either never received information about his birth place, or they were given false information by Fox news.
What you are saying about contingency fee lawyers is mostly true. They do not get paid until the case is settled in favour of their client. In most people's conception this means "My case settled for $100 000, the lawyer gets between 20-30% and I get the other 70-80%.
However at least in Canada the is one HUGE issue. The matter of fees and disbursements. Things that fall under this category can range from photocopies (25 cents each), courier fees ($50-100 each), travel expenses (hundreds of dollars) to medical reports (thousands of dollars).
In some cases the lawyer can negotiate a deal where their fees and disbursements are paid by the defendant. If the case is very strong, that is what usually happens, because the settlement is large enough that it doesn't matter anyway. What is an extra $30,000 to an insurance company that will pay $500,000 or $1mil anyway?
However, if the case is weak or the damage is not as extensive, these fees and disbursements come out of the client's pocket AFTER the layer took their cut already. So in the first example, the case settles for $100,000, the lawyer gets 30% PLUS up to $20-30,000, and the client only ends up with $40-50,000. Not nearly as rosy as most people think.
I am not a programmer, so I have no idea which platform is easier to develop for, but having owned every single Maemo device Nokia has shipped (N770, N800, N810 and now N900), I loved them.
The N900 is by far the most tweakable device I've ever used, and the most open. How many smartphones out there can run a custom kernel that allows overclocking, shh-ing into the phone, and editing text config files? How about upgrading, downgrading and replacing individual packages?
The community built around these 4 generations of devices is fairly small, but very dedicated. At least it was before the Meego announcement. Since then quite a few developers have left, including the creator of rootsh (if you've done ANYTHING custom on the N900, the first step is installing rootsh).
Nokia should have banked on this community. They should have kept Symbian for the lower end, mass produced phones, and push Maemo at the high end. They have been promising this for a year now, but I only see Symbian phones coming out.
It saddens me when my overclocked N900 has almost identical specs to the high end iPhone 4, yet nobody pays any attention to it because it's a year old already. Developers do not want to waste time with old phones, they want to know there is something else in the pipeline that people will buy and run apps on.
I used to own a Vaio SR490 that took a small bump when I crashed my motorcycle. It still worked just fine, but one of the screen hinge caps broke and the DC plug was exposed.
I wanted to replace it, and the cheapest I found that little piece online was $40+shipping. Cheapest I found it from Sony? $60+tax+shipping. It's a small piece of molded plastic, that even after manufacture, storage, etc cannot cost more than a few dollars.
I could have continued using the laptop as is, but it was bugging the hell out of me. So I sold it. That is how you get consumers to replace gear. What Sony did not count on was me buying an Asus instead of a Sony just for spite. :)
In my case it stored all the information in its own database and then cleaned any trace of former tags from the music files themselves. I said that people reading my post will start replying "It cannot happen", "I've used every version of iTunes since the dawn of time and none did that to me".
Well, it did happen dammit! I was there, and I'm not a computer n00b, even though I'm posting this from Seamonkey running on Win7. :) Even if losing the id3 tags was a result of a bug in my particular build of iTunes and the previous as well as next versions worked as intended it still doesn't change things.
You are correct with regards to the actual mp3 files. They should contain artist, album, song and track number information. That is why I accepted the need to edit my music collection. But that still doesn't change the fact that iTunes deleted existing ID3 tags completely. Those ID3 tags were gone, wiped clean, destroyed, NOT THERE ANYMORE.
Whether it may have been a bug in that version of iTunes or all versions of iTunes behave the same way I do not know. And I will NEVER find out, because I will never allow iTunes within 10ft of any music files I have.
I briefly owned a 2nd generation iPod Nano when they were brand new, and of course it insisted I install iTunes in order to transfer music to it. I installed it, uploaded some songs, and found out that Apple insists on ignoring folder structure when organizing music playlists. Since all my mp3s came from random sources, the id3 tags were a mess, but up to that point I did not care. Every computer and mp3 player I had used to that point was fine reading folders first with Artist_name/Album_name/track_number_-_song_name being the default sort.
Apple just HAD to be different. It was using just file names and id3 tags to sort songs in playlists, so "Unknown Artist", "Doors" and "The Doors" were all different, even though on my PC they were all under the same folder. This was annoying beyond belief, but I wanted to fix the id3 tags anyway at some point.
So I embarked on the gargantuan task of editing the id3 tags in my entire music collection, about 90Gb at the time, using iTunes. It wasn't as horrible as I thought, since iTunes does have batch id3 tag processing. At first everything was fine, all my songs were nicely organized both in iTunes and iPod.
Then a few months later I decided to sell the iPod Nano and just use a cellphone as an mp3 player. Since I was only using iTunes to sync the Nano and play the mp3s, and I always liked foobar better anyway, I uninstalled it. HUGE MISTAKE!!!!!
It turned out that iTunes wiped out the id3 tags from the songs and stored them somewhere else, because when I loaded the mp3s in foobar not a single one still had their tags. They were wiped clean! I posted this before and people said it must have been a mistake on my part. But I promise you guys, every single file in my music collection did not have an id3 tag. Verified with several media players on several computers.
After that I swore never to buy another product that requires iTunes to function. I'd probably be tempted by an iPhone 4 once my Nokia N900 breaks down, but since I have to use iTunes, it won't happen...
Much appreciated. :) The only problem with having all clips on one page though is that if you don't want to finish watching one of them, they'll still finish buffering in the background after you've paused it and moved on to the next one. Not a problem on a desktop or a laptop, but on my N900 this can be a bit of an issue.
My experience is by no means exhaustive, obviously there were Palms that never broke down. Overall their reliability was not bad, but the cheap plastic housings, low res screens with THICK screen fonts, antiquated launcher, and generally a lack of features made them feel like sub par alternatives to Sony Clies. It was almost as if Palm OS was created by Sony, and Palm was just a licensee that didn't quite know how to implement it or design the hardware. You should really look at a TX side by side with a Clie TH55 or better yet an NX80, and you'd know what I mean.
And that's also the feeling I get when I compare the Pre to the iPhone or to my N900. It's cheap, cheap, cheap.
I started with the Palm Pilot 5000, and over the past 10 years I've never been without a Palm OS PDA. Just to prove that I am as familiar with Palm OS devices, here's a short list of the ones I've owned for at least a few months at a time: Palm Pilot 5000, Palm Vx, Clie SJ30, Palm m505, four Palm TX, Clie NR70, two Clie NX70 and three Clie TH55. The reason there are so many duplicates on the list is because I was buying and selling them at a small profit.
For the most part the hardware was reliable, but the ONLY devices to completely fail on me were the Palm ones. The battery died on my Vx, and replacing it was impossible without butchering it (disassembly instructions involved using a heat gun to melt the glue) or spending a lot of money to have it replaced by Palm with a refurbished unit. The touch screen on one TX stopped responding, and another TX stopped charging. Every Clie I've ever owned on the other hand was still running, no matter how abused it was. I bought a Clie NX73 off Ebay, and when it arrived, the hinge was completely worn out, the casing was beaten up everywhere, the screen was scratched BUT it was working perfectly. In terms of features the Clies were also far ahead of any Palm device. They had high resolution color screens, memory card slots, wifi, BT before anything from Palm, and they had MUCH better build quality and materials to boot.
When Palm announced the Pre I was really excited, because WebOS looked amazing and the hardware had great specs. Backwards compatibility with PalmOS apps was also a HUGE bonus. But the anticipation lasted precisely until I got to actually hold a Pre in my hand. I absolutely, positively hated it! The shiny plastic shell was cheap and scratch prone (just like the TX). The sliding keyboard was awkward, cramped and had a raised lip around it that feelt unfinished. Overall the Pre was a big disappointment. Not a bad device, but worth half what Palm was charging for it.
At this point I was really hoping someone will license the WebOS and design a GOOD smartphone to run it. That never happened and probably never will, since all manufacturers went with Android. In the meantime I picked up a Nokia N900 and I'm not sorry I did. I can still run my PalmOS apps through Garnett, and having a full Linux computer at my fingertips is simply amazing.
So that's my take on it. :)
You either are too young to remember, or you have a short memory.
Microsoft went out of their way to maintain compatibility with their own older software. But until recently they always tried to block competition intentionally. Although Windows 3.1 ran perfectly on DR-DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS, it was returning an non-fatal error message, in effect convincing users there was something wrong with DR-DOS. Eventually Novell gave up on DR-DOS and sold it to Caldera (now called SCO). The ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court sometime in 2000 for $155 million, with Novell and Caldera sharing the profits. This is just one example.
When they couldn't outright deny competitors access, Microsoft's policy was embrace, extend, extinguish. Internet Explorer 4 and 5 were NOT standards compliant. I remember running Mozilla M18 and encountering sites that would only render in IE properly, that is if Mozilla wasn't blocked outright. How is that not purposely blocking competing software? Only after FireFox started gaining traction did Microsoft release standards compliant browsers.
The point is today Microsoft is a better company because the competition forced them to open up and listen to their clients. Remove competitive pressure and I promise you they'll revert to their old policies.
I am getting at least 1 day for a charge, usually 2 days. BUT here's how I use it:
- 1-2h worth of phone conversations over GSM with a BT headset.
- 1-2h a day as an ebook reader. Fbreader is AWSOME, between my old N800, N810 and now N900, I think I read 100 books using these devices.
- Constantly connected to WiFi (where available, which is almost everywhere for me) or 3G, checking my gmail accounts every 5 mins throughout the day, being available on skype, etc.
The difference between 1 day and 2 day charges is whether or not I play movies, use the FM transmitter or the GPS. Streaming flash clips off the web through WiFi or 3G will take a LOT of battery life. Same goes for using the FM transmitter to broadcast music to my car stereo, or the GPS but that's in my car where I have a charger.
The latest N900 firmware resolved a LOT of issues. Not sure what firmware the review phone is using, but looking at his theme, it's an older one. My N900 with firmware 3.2010.02-8.002 released about a month ago loads up ALL apps faster than in the review. Same goes for the touchscreen lag. The next firmware, due to be released in a couple of weeks will improve things even further.
But that's not all. :) The N900 also gets faster as you use it. After a cold boot the RAM has 100Mb used, but after loading all sorts of apps it goes up to 153Mb and stays there. Those extra 50Mb contain cashing data for all your apps. I just tried every app I could think of: Communications (SMS and IM), Firefox, Contacts, Phone, Media Player (not MediaBox), Disk Usage, battery-eye, Settings, Application Manager, File Manager, Xterm, PDF Reader, Email. Every single one loaded up instantly, in less than 1 sec.
The only offender is MediaBox, because it insists on scanning your entire device for music, movies, etc. BTW, the N900 can play regular AVI movies without dropping frames or losing sound sync, AND it can output to any TV. I watched 9 (the entire animation movie) full screen on my HD TV the other day. :))
And I NEVER need to reboot my N900, it's rock solid. Even if the first time you start the apps it takes as long as on the iPhone, after 10 mins of use it's much faster.
Well olddotter, the N900 has to perform all the phone related tasks you've listed as well. So your point doesn't apply.
I've had my Nokia N900 for a couple of months now, and for those unaware, most of the specs are identical to the iPhone 3Gs 32Gb. Well, except that it has a much higher resolution screen, a keyboard, a real GPS, an FM transmitter and a microUSB port for data and charging. But the CPU/GPU and amount of storage are the same, except that you can also add a microSD card to the N900. But now on to the most important difference to the 3Gs. I've used both my N900 and a 3Gs, and the 3Gs just feels sluggish, while having half the functionality.
Flipping home screens on the N900, regardless of how many icons and widgets it's running is smooth, with no clipping. Even with half a dozen apps running in the background, the UI remains equally fast (several instances of the Firefox, Application Manager, Communication app, Contacts app, Skype, MediaBox, battery-eye, conky, etc). Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier. It's not a large difference, but keep in mind the hardware is identical and the iPhone has NO applications running in the background.
The N900 also starts up applications faster, in most cases instantaneously. Start up times do increase progressively after about 3-4 large apps are already loaded and actually doing stuff in the background (Firefox loading up pages, Application Manager checking for updates, MediaBox playing music). But many utilities that only refresh while in the foreground do not have any impact at all (Conky, battery-eye, disk usage, etc). In contrast, the 3Gs takes a couple of seconds to load up pretty much every app I tried, regardless of how limited its functionality is, and complex apps take even longer.
Once the apps are running, they are roughly equally fast on both the N900 and the 3Gs. But as I stated above, the N900 may be running several apps in the background, and the foreground apps do not slow down at all.
I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees. The iPhone OS takes much more resources to run than Maemo or Android, and the iPhone single tasking is a way of masking it. Of course this is speculation since except for the basic Apple apps, nobody managed run more than one app at the same time on the iPhone. And I'm sure those Apple apps are optimized and tweaked to hook into the OS and stay loaded at all times. Most likely the 4G will have a faster processor and more RAM, and will compensate for the OS shortcomings through brute force.
Man, if when you go to remote holiday locations you need to play computer games, you should pick better destinations. :)
But I completely agree with you about the rest. Games should not need a net connection under any circumstances, unless playing online.
You're going to need to brush up on your grammar. The OP is right.