What deadlocks? Two different processes running.NET code (CE or not, it doesn't matter) don't share anything, so no locks are involved. Ditto for "relinquish devices" stupidity - WinCE is a true multitasking OS, and.NET doesn't suddenly change that.
They share the screen, they share file resources, they consume memory, they consume CPU. There are numerous ways the CF runtime may not have been optimized to support 2 apps at once. Indeed the OS doesn't support 2 apps at once would suggest this is exactly the case. I would as happy as anyone else to know the real reason.
As for WinCE, irrelevant. Windows Phone 7 has a completely overhauled the graphical front end so what the OS used to do in the crappy old Win32-esque API days is irrelevant.
The reason why there's no multitasking is the same as it was on iPhone - so that apps don't drain battery in the background.
That was a weak excuse when iPhone apologists employed it as it would be now for Windows. Android demonstrates you can have multitask apps without significantly hurting anything. An OS can suspend background apps or reduce their priority or even kill them if it needs the resources elsewhere. Android manages it (indeed my phone's task manager shows I have about 20 processes running at the moment). Even iOS manages it now.
There is no excuse that Windows Phone can't except code immaturity.
Technology and frequency differences? You've got to be shitting me. They don't work because the cell operators are greedy assholes.
The EU telcos are greedy assholes too, however the EU in their wisdom has mandated minimum telecoms standards which ensure a large degree of interoperability while still allowing telcos to compete on services, charges etc.
Biggest issues facing EU users would be roaming charges, especially data roaming charges which are nothing short of a scam at the moment. To give you an idea of ridiculous it is, O2 charge a ridiculous £3 per megabyte for roaming. You could be roaming on a Telefonica network (O2's parent company) and they'd still rape you even though the cost to them must be pennies. That's not unique to O2, they the networks are at it.
I don't understand why the EU aren't stomping on the practice since it is blatant profiteering.
WP7 doesn't do multitasking with third party apps (only Microsoft's own apps has this advantage, go figure...),
I bet that particular "feature" can be chalked up the the general craptitude of the.NET Compact Framework they've chosen to ship with. It probably uses too much memory, deadlocks, can't relinquish devices or otherwise does nasty things which assume only one running instance.
All the 1st party apps are native, so they're not affected. 3rd party apps are expected to use the runtime so they are. Assuming the APIs that apps run against define a sensible life cycle I don't see any reason they couldn't fix it.
But it does highlight how immature Windows Phone 7 is despite its glossy UI. Other red flags are things like it's inability to deal with removable storage as well as various things that were in 6.5 but not 7. Clearly these things can be (re)implemented but until they are, I would advise anyone thinking of picking up one of these phones to run a mile.
Well you can release a new phone without those things because Microsoft have. I don't think it's any coincidence that Windows Phone 7 is targetting casual users first. It means they can get away without some of the more esoteric requirements of business customers.
Personally I think the situation with Windows Phone 7 is like a person recovering from brain surgery. The OS has undergone a radical procedure and while the long term prognosis is good, it's still going to be a while before you can say it's fully recovered. The problem for Microsoft is the smart phone market is a ruthless place, and frankly there are better phone operating systems to buy than theirs. By the time they've implemented things like multi-tasking etc. I expect both Android and iOS will be onto their next major iterations.
If you thought it was hard to read a doctor's handwriting when they used a pen, just wait until you see what it looks like when they fingerpaint on their capacitive iPad screen.
More seriously, what the hell problem is this politician even trying to address by handing out iPads? If doctors want access to a patients medical info, it's likely there is clipboard on the bed which has it and failing that a duty station on the ward where it could be accessed. Expecting doctors to haul around a fragile computer (and remember to charge it) is just asking for trouble. They'll be forgotten, broken (when they slide off beds), they'll be implicated with the spread of germs and carry all sorts of other baggage. I also expect that wifi enabling every public and private hospital ward is easier said than done for a whole raft of reasons.
When Frontier:Elite II was released, it had a reputation for being a very buggy game and that was nothing in comparison to what you describe.
Oh I don't know about that. Fronter: Elite II was virtually unplayable on the Amiga. As in, it would quite happily crash almost as soon as the game started, and if not then, soon after.
If an ordinary person can get fined millions of dollars for minor IP violations, then a corporation the size of Telstra should be fined tens of billions for knowingly violating the GPL in a flagship product. But of course, the law is never fair.
Okay, it shouldn't have gotten to this stage, but the only remedy required by the GPL is they release the source code to the GPL bits and supply it upon demand. In a modern context, that means hosting the source code on their own web browser and making it easy to obtain.
The reality these days is virtually many TVs, routers, phones, set top box, blu ray player etc. have Linux in there somewhere. But even if the vendor supplied the GPL bits, it would meet their obligations but most likely it would not do anything for anyone else hoping to hack the box. Most likely you would get some kernel source code, a few libs and busybox. The actual meat and potatoes, whatever application or libs made the box do something could and would be withheld.
From a quick glance it looks like Scala with a more Java-like syntax... I wonder what added benefit they hope to bring.
Well if it were a superset of Java then the answer to that should be obvious. I sense people are getting seriously fed up with Oracle / Sun's glacial development schedule as well as all the legal shenanigans. Java 7 is the Duke Nuke Em of language iterations. If someone produces a Java with extensions (almost like C++ was C with classes originally) then they might jumpstart development again and free it from the withered claws of Oracle.
I realise of course that there are lots of languages vying to be Java++ (e.g. Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc.). I expect in the end that like C++ vs Objective C that it won't necessarily be the most elegant solution that wins, but the most practical. It will be the one which allows people to preserve most of their existing codebase and provide a seamless transition to something better. The disadvantage to Gosu is it appears to be closed source and that would kill it stone dead as far as most developers would be concerned.
Re:Oracle is doing everything they can to fuck up
on
Oracle To Monetize Java VM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
People are not going to go and buy something to make Java apps work better. Perhaps companies who rely heavily on Java on the back end will, but more likely they'll just stop upgrading and switch to something else.
I'm surprised Oracle even have such a grip on Java as they have. Why doesn't someone produce a comprehensive open source test suite analogous to the real certficiation tests? Then who cares if a JVM is officially blessed Java or just some offshoot.
Because many of us routinely run X11 programs on one system with the display on another? Switch to Wayland and you lose that capability, which is a massive benefit to professional Linux users.
A X server can run over wayland. It's not hard either to envisage that GNOME dynamically chooses the right backend to use dependent on the circumstance.
X11 is probably more efficient on a modern multi-core system since the rendering and display logic run in different processes.
Excessive context switches and an event driven GUI don't necessarily mix. Sometimes you want less processes, and if concurrency is desirable in cases then they could be done with threads in the same process. Anecdotally with similar drivers (e.g. commercial NVidia) I've never thought to myself, damn Linux is faster than Windows. Usually its the exact opposite and that's when Windows is running Aero compared to a vanilla GNOME with minimal effects. The only time when the systems get closer parity is for games and such like which cut a hole through X with DRI and more or less hit the hardware directly.
GTK is cross platform and I assume GNOME could be too with the proper abstractions. At the end of the day why should GNOME app developers or users really care what windowing technology is underneath powering their desktop? Apps just call the APIs and provided the port maps them onto the appropriate native equivalent, things just work.
Obviously not every GNOME app is "pure" and I'm sure there are plenty of hacks to work out. But at the end of the day QT devs don't really have to care too much which OS or platform they're targetting and I don't see the situation being that different for GNOME either. We already have apps like GIMP ported to Windows so clearly the concept is already much the way there.
The question is whether Linux would be better off doing away with X11 in the long run. Fundamentally why does Linux need to stick with using X11? After all, if you need X11 you could always run it as a server over wayland (this is how X11 runs on OS X or Windows). And if you don't need X11, then the system benefits from a more streamlined graphical layer with all the compositing done in the display driver next to the kernel rather than being farmed out by X to an extension and back and forth several times with various hacks.
Wow, sweet spot is 7 feet? I somehow doubt it's going to do well in the Japanese market;).
Or people who don't live in cavernous clutter free environments. i.e. people in bedsits, dorms, bedrooms, apartments, highrise flats, terraced houses, semis or basically anywhere where you'd be lucky to have 2 metes of space between the TV and a couch. Even those people who do have space will likely have a coffee table or something in the way.
Sure, it gets mixed up when you do things like cross your arms or hide them behind your back, but it isn't THAT much of an issue.
Games have been designed to work around that issue. Often by requiring you to perform some wildly exaggerated movement in order to make it as unambiguous as possible.
The fundamental problem is that it is mindbuggeringly hard for computers to infer stuff from analogue inputs. Even state of the art biometric systems can't claim 100% accuracy and I expect the threshold of Kinect in optimal conditions would be way less than that.
However, in case of Opera Mini, I explicitly agree to such manipulations and to accompanying technical solutions.
AOL used to do this too. If you loaded a page through their crappy client software, a transparent proxy would replace the original JPG / GIF with an equivalent ART image. ART was an AOL proprietary image format which was pretty good at compressing images at low data rates. I suppose the theory was they made their software more responsive and reduced bandwidth / phone charges for a largely unnoticeable drop in image quality.
Then watch it fail when used in real life by actual gamers.
If you think it's annoying to get up and load a disc in a console and then wait for it to start, just imagine how annoying it would be to rearrange your room before starting a game. That's assuming your room can be arranged. Anyone wishing to use it in an apartment, flat, council house, bedroom, basement, or basically any room which does not provide 2 meters of clear space in front of the device is screwed. Perhaps we'll see a blip in the housing market as people move or build extensions in order to play their Kinect.
Then in order to play you get to stand up the whole time. That's par for the course for a dance / fitness game but a serious limitation for anything else. Imagine standing up right for any amount of time, arms out in thin air pretending to steer a car for example. Don't scratch your nose or you'll crash into the wall.
If the only difference is a single numerical value, it should be easy enough to catch.
Until the arms race starts. Banks will start to embed digits in images with random urls or inject them from impenetrable randomized javascript or otherwise stuff enough random crap or formatting changes into the page to defeat any meaningful comparison.
The problem is that there is a distinction at all. ChromeOS probably offers a superior browsing experience but it will be horrible in most other regards. Android is a remarkably rounded device but is suffering from lack of support for a burgeoning variety of PMPs, ereaders, tablets, netbooks etc. which are trying to use it.
Google's message is really confused. Arguably as confused or worse as Microsoft supporting Windows Phone 7 AND Kin.
It's confusing to everybody. It's clear that Android has longer legs than ChromeOS and to an outside observer it looks like two rival camps inside Google are having a turf war. The CEO should be killing one project and moving the good stuff into the other.
Android could be the basis of an easy, cheap, secure computer too. Furthermore it's already proven, has massive industry support and is (over) due a major release shortly. Why Google would choose to muddy the waters with yet another OS which encroaches into the same functionality as Android is beyond me.
The benefits that ChromeOS touts boil down to fast boot and web apps. I don't see either as things that couldn't be integrated with Android.
Google has ChromeOS. Google has Android. What the hell are Google doing releasing two disparate operating systems like this? It confuses everyone and I suspect it's the result of two camps within Google fighting a turf war. It certainly doesn't seem like a coherent strategy whatsoever.
For the life of me I can't understand why the touted features of ChromeOS (e.g. webapps) couldn't be integrated into Android. It's not like Android is some bloated legacy OS - it would be perfectly suited to notebooks with relatively modest changes to address the different form factor & inputs.
The Times carries pretty much the same level of market coverage as other broadsheets. I'm sure it's an interesting read but it would be the Financial Times (which uniquely is printed on pink paper) that market people would read the most. Notably the electronic version is already partially behind a paywall, but then again it has unique content that specialist people want to read and the general public can do without or find alternatives for.
Isn't one of the advantages of Android the ability to install apps from other than the Google app store? So people who really want this thing can still get it, independently of Google's disapproving glare, right?
I expect people who use dodgy pirate app stores for android will get it for free as an special introductory offer.
The home page for that project looks horrific. It looks like something dragged from the ass of a design student ten minutes before submission time. "oh shit oh shit I forgot to do my assignment last night - okay I'll compose myself here and fire up AutoCAD software - ok bezier curve, bezier curve, change texture, extrude, add wheels, submit, phew that was close, oh fuck I only added 3 wheels! Oh shit oh shit oh shit"
I think they need to get themselves some better concept drawings.
The Times is a very readable newspaper and generally kept its "opinion" to the editorials where it belonged. The problem I see is that there is nothing special about it. Lots of news sites are readable and a lot of news is recycled PA / Reuters agency stuff anyway. Of the remainder, it's still just reporting the same news that every other news outlet is reporting on. Unless you advidly had to do the Times crossword or read the letters page or the bridge column or whatever else remains then what distinguishes the Times from any other news outlet? You can get substantially the same content (or analogous) content from a number of free sources.
So if the Times wants to go behind a paywall... well so long we hardly knew ye. Ex-readers will have to console themselves with reading the Telegraph instead which I'm sure will be grateful if it increases the number of page impressions.
Slashdot Mirror
They share the screen, they share file resources, they consume memory, they consume CPU. There are numerous ways the CF runtime may not have been optimized to support 2 apps at once. Indeed the OS doesn't support 2 apps at once would suggest this is exactly the case. I would as happy as anyone else to know the real reason.
As for WinCE, irrelevant. Windows Phone 7 has a completely overhauled the graphical front end so what the OS used to do in the crappy old Win32-esque API days is irrelevant.
The reason why there's no multitasking is the same as it was on iPhone - so that apps don't drain battery in the background.
That was a weak excuse when iPhone apologists employed it as it would be now for Windows. Android demonstrates you can have multitask apps without significantly hurting anything. An OS can suspend background apps or reduce their priority or even kill them if it needs the resources elsewhere. Android manages it (indeed my phone's task manager shows I have about 20 processes running at the moment). Even iOS manages it now.
There is no excuse that Windows Phone can't except code immaturity.
The EU telcos are greedy assholes too, however the EU in their wisdom has mandated minimum telecoms standards which ensure a large degree of interoperability while still allowing telcos to compete on services, charges etc.
Biggest issues facing EU users would be roaming charges, especially data roaming charges which are nothing short of a scam at the moment. To give you an idea of ridiculous it is, O2 charge a ridiculous £3 per megabyte for roaming. You could be roaming on a Telefonica network (O2's parent company) and they'd still rape you even though the cost to them must be pennies. That's not unique to O2, they the networks are at it.
I don't understand why the EU aren't stomping on the practice since it is blatant profiteering.
I bet that particular "feature" can be chalked up the the general craptitude of the .NET Compact Framework they've chosen to ship with. It probably uses too much memory, deadlocks, can't relinquish devices or otherwise does nasty things which assume only one running instance.
All the 1st party apps are native, so they're not affected. 3rd party apps are expected to use the runtime so they are. Assuming the APIs that apps run against define a sensible life cycle I don't see any reason they couldn't fix it.
But it does highlight how immature Windows Phone 7 is despite its glossy UI. Other red flags are things like it's inability to deal with removable storage as well as various things that were in 6.5 but not 7. Clearly these things can be (re)implemented but until they are, I would advise anyone thinking of picking up one of these phones to run a mile.
Personally I think the situation with Windows Phone 7 is like a person recovering from brain surgery. The OS has undergone a radical procedure and while the long term prognosis is good, it's still going to be a while before you can say it's fully recovered. The problem for Microsoft is the smart phone market is a ruthless place, and frankly there are better phone operating systems to buy than theirs. By the time they've implemented things like multi-tasking etc. I expect both Android and iOS will be onto their next major iterations.
More seriously, what the hell problem is this politician even trying to address by handing out iPads? If doctors want access to a patients medical info, it's likely there is clipboard on the bed which has it and failing that a duty station on the ward where it could be accessed. Expecting doctors to haul around a fragile computer (and remember to charge it) is just asking for trouble. They'll be forgotten, broken (when they slide off beds), they'll be implicated with the spread of germs and carry all sorts of other baggage. I also expect that wifi enabling every public and private hospital ward is easier said than done for a whole raft of reasons.
None of your examples are "stealing", although televangelists almost by definition solicit money under false pretenses.
Oh I don't know about that. Fronter: Elite II was virtually unplayable on the Amiga. As in, it would quite happily crash almost as soon as the game started, and if not then, soon after.
Okay, it shouldn't have gotten to this stage, but the only remedy required by the GPL is they release the source code to the GPL bits and supply it upon demand. In a modern context, that means hosting the source code on their own web browser and making it easy to obtain.
The reality these days is virtually many TVs, routers, phones, set top box, blu ray player etc. have Linux in there somewhere. But even if the vendor supplied the GPL bits, it would meet their obligations but most likely it would not do anything for anyone else hoping to hack the box. Most likely you would get some kernel source code, a few libs and busybox. The actual meat and potatoes, whatever application or libs made the box do something could and would be withheld.
Well if it were a superset of Java then the answer to that should be obvious. I sense people are getting seriously fed up with Oracle / Sun's glacial development schedule as well as all the legal shenanigans. Java 7 is the Duke Nuke Em of language iterations. If someone produces a Java with extensions (almost like C++ was C with classes originally) then they might jumpstart development again and free it from the withered claws of Oracle.
I realise of course that there are lots of languages vying to be Java++ (e.g. Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc.). I expect in the end that like C++ vs Objective C that it won't necessarily be the most elegant solution that wins, but the most practical. It will be the one which allows people to preserve most of their existing codebase and provide a seamless transition to something better. The disadvantage to Gosu is it appears to be closed source and that would kill it stone dead as far as most developers would be concerned.
I'm surprised Oracle even have such a grip on Java as they have. Why doesn't someone produce a comprehensive open source test suite analogous to the real certficiation tests? Then who cares if a JVM is officially blessed Java or just some offshoot.
A X server can run over wayland. It's not hard either to envisage that GNOME dynamically chooses the right backend to use dependent on the circumstance.
X11 is probably more efficient on a modern multi-core system since the rendering and display logic run in different processes.
Excessive context switches and an event driven GUI don't necessarily mix. Sometimes you want less processes, and if concurrency is desirable in cases then they could be done with threads in the same process. Anecdotally with similar drivers (e.g. commercial NVidia) I've never thought to myself, damn Linux is faster than Windows. Usually its the exact opposite and that's when Windows is running Aero compared to a vanilla GNOME with minimal effects. The only time when the systems get closer parity is for games and such like which cut a hole through X with DRI and more or less hit the hardware directly.
Obviously not every GNOME app is "pure" and I'm sure there are plenty of hacks to work out. But at the end of the day QT devs don't really have to care too much which OS or platform they're targetting and I don't see the situation being that different for GNOME either. We already have apps like GIMP ported to Windows so clearly the concept is already much the way there.
The question is whether Linux would be better off doing away with X11 in the long run. Fundamentally why does Linux need to stick with using X11? After all, if you need X11 you could always run it as a server over wayland (this is how X11 runs on OS X or Windows). And if you don't need X11, then the system benefits from a more streamlined graphical layer with all the compositing done in the display driver next to the kernel rather than being farmed out by X to an extension and back and forth several times with various hacks.
Or people who don't live in cavernous clutter free environments. i.e. people in bedsits, dorms, bedrooms, apartments, highrise flats, terraced houses, semis or basically anywhere where you'd be lucky to have 2 metes of space between the TV and a couch. Even those people who do have space will likely have a coffee table or something in the way.
Games have been designed to work around that issue. Often by requiring you to perform some wildly exaggerated movement in order to make it as unambiguous as possible.
The fundamental problem is that it is mindbuggeringly hard for computers to infer stuff from analogue inputs. Even state of the art biometric systems can't claim 100% accuracy and I expect the threshold of Kinect in optimal conditions would be way less than that.
AOL used to do this too. If you loaded a page through their crappy client software, a transparent proxy would replace the original JPG / GIF with an equivalent ART image. ART was an AOL proprietary image format which was pretty good at compressing images at low data rates. I suppose the theory was they made their software more responsive and reduced bandwidth / phone charges for a largely unnoticeable drop in image quality.
If you think it's annoying to get up and load a disc in a console and then wait for it to start, just imagine how annoying it would be to rearrange your room before starting a game. That's assuming your room can be arranged. Anyone wishing to use it in an apartment, flat, council house, bedroom, basement, or basically any room which does not provide 2 meters of clear space in front of the device is screwed. Perhaps we'll see a blip in the housing market as people move or build extensions in order to play their Kinect.
Then in order to play you get to stand up the whole time. That's par for the course for a dance / fitness game but a serious limitation for anything else. Imagine standing up right for any amount of time, arms out in thin air pretending to steer a car for example. Don't scratch your nose or you'll crash into the wall.
Until the arms race starts. Banks will start to embed digits in images with random urls or inject them from impenetrable randomized javascript or otherwise stuff enough random crap or formatting changes into the page to defeat any meaningful comparison.
The problem is that there is a distinction at all. ChromeOS probably offers a superior browsing experience but it will be horrible in most other regards. Android is a remarkably rounded device but is suffering from lack of support for a burgeoning variety of PMPs, ereaders, tablets, netbooks etc. which are trying to use it. Google's message is really confused. Arguably as confused or worse as Microsoft supporting Windows Phone 7 AND Kin. It's confusing to everybody. It's clear that Android has longer legs than ChromeOS and to an outside observer it looks like two rival camps inside Google are having a turf war. The CEO should be killing one project and moving the good stuff into the other.
The benefits that ChromeOS touts boil down to fast boot and web apps. I don't see either as things that couldn't be integrated with Android.
Google has ChromeOS. Google has Android. What the hell are Google doing releasing two disparate operating systems like this? It confuses everyone and I suspect it's the result of two camps within Google fighting a turf war. It certainly doesn't seem like a coherent strategy whatsoever. For the life of me I can't understand why the touted features of ChromeOS (e.g. webapps) couldn't be integrated into Android. It's not like Android is some bloated legacy OS - it would be perfectly suited to notebooks with relatively modest changes to address the different form factor & inputs.
The Times carries pretty much the same level of market coverage as other broadsheets. I'm sure it's an interesting read but it would be the Financial Times (which uniquely is printed on pink paper) that market people would read the most. Notably the electronic version is already partially behind a paywall, but then again it has unique content that specialist people want to read and the general public can do without or find alternatives for.
I expect people who use dodgy pirate app stores for android will get it for free as an special introductory offer.
Google tracks you with your consent. If you don't like it, don't consent. Delete your cookies, use rival search engines, don't buy a "smart phone".
The home page for that project looks horrific. It looks like something dragged from the ass of a design student ten minutes before submission time. "oh shit oh shit I forgot to do my assignment last night - okay I'll compose myself here and fire up AutoCAD software - ok bezier curve, bezier curve, change texture, extrude, add wheels, submit, phew that was close, oh fuck I only added 3 wheels! Oh shit oh shit oh shit" I think they need to get themselves some better concept drawings.
The Times is a very readable newspaper and generally kept its "opinion" to the editorials where it belonged. The problem I see is that there is nothing special about it. Lots of news sites are readable and a lot of news is recycled PA / Reuters agency stuff anyway. Of the remainder, it's still just reporting the same news that every other news outlet is reporting on. Unless you advidly had to do the Times crossword or read the letters page or the bridge column or whatever else remains then what distinguishes the Times from any other news outlet? You can get substantially the same content (or analogous) content from a number of free sources. So if the Times wants to go behind a paywall... well so long we hardly knew ye. Ex-readers will have to console themselves with reading the Telegraph instead which I'm sure will be grateful if it increases the number of page impressions.