"Google denies a report that it is sharing advertising revenues derived from mobile applications on Android smartphones with carrier and handset partners. The search engine maintains the only revenue sharing it engages in is from paying carriers a cut of its search-related advertising sales."
You haven't read your own quote. The quote clearly says that it is about sharing advertising revenues. This actually implies that they are receiving revenue from these sources and are keeping it for themselves rather than paying some of it to the people who make the phones.
Then (with wmctrl installed) and the correct width and height set you can easily just add a keyboard shortcut (I use Super-Left and Super-Right) to resize windows to half the screen size.
Why should we have a dock instead of a taskbar? The only advantage I can see is that you can launch an application from it which I solve by having two panels in gnome one with launchers on and the other with a taskbar.
The obvious disadvantage is that having multiple windows from the same program open is awkward with a dock. I need to click/hover on the icon which then pops up a sub menu which I then select the window from. With a task bar I see them both so I just click in one spot and get the window open.
There are some use cases where burn it can happen. At my old school the login screen was burnt onto the monitor because it was showing so much of the time. The screens looked like LCD.
For online banking an infected router is not a problem. There is a secure encrypted and authenticated connection between you and your bank. The problem is software on your PC.
I just had a look at one of them, http://www.stemcellfoundation.ca/ to be precise, I was definitely underwhelmed. For a start it took over 30 seconds to load, I am connected to a University network which gets over 80 mbits so either their servers can't cope with the large page or the page is very large. Either way it is unacceptably slow. Transitions are animated making them slow compared to a normal html page.
There is a scrollable box of text which can be scrolled in precisely one way which is to drag the little round thing on the scrollbar. This compares to a fully functional scrollbar with three navigation options, using my mouses scroll wheel, using cursor keys or Page Up/Down and autoscroll (middle mouse click and scroll). If I am on their web page my mouses back button breaks as does equivalent keyboard shortcuts. I can't open a new tab using ctrl-T. Middle clicking links does nothing when it should open in a new tab. They even made a small text heading the same color as a link (links aren't underlined of course) so it is indistinguishable without rolling over with a mouse (which causes a non standard fade effect on actual links). Hopefully you never want to copy any text because you won't be able to select it. Also the scrolling problems are exacerbated by the fact that on my 1680x1050 monitor I have a nice 530*330 box to read the text in.
So in conclusion usability is a joke since it breaks the vast majority of UI conventions.
There is a useless gimmick of having looping videos of the peoples faces rather than a still photo, adds nothing other than a slightly cool factor when you first visit which I would say is outweighed by the annoyances of the people in the videos shifting uncomfortably plus increased download time.
Trying to sign the charter brings up a nice form which conveniently has none of my saved data like an html form so I have to type everything in myself. You can copy/paste to these boxes though, although with the caveat of my Linux middle click paste not working (I would have been shocked if it had. The auto country filler is quite nice I will admit except for the minor thing where it wipes the box if you click it once it has been filled. Also the font rendering is horrible on the form page for some reason, there seem to be small patches on letter which are faded.
After thoroughly browsing this usability disaster I somehow don't feel much respect for the webbyawards. This is precisely why Flash websites are such a bad move. Flash itself is great for those things which need a richer environment than html can provide, such as games and video and some web applications.
I see your point. Maybe it is because I am a student but I don't spend money on that kind of stuff either. I get novels from the library, read once for free, take them back. I rarely watch films and don't personally own a DVD. I don't really care about music either. Occasionally I will open up Spotify but most the time I don't play anything or play background instrumental pieces from Jamendo (CC music e.g. Celestial Aeon Project).
As far as I am aware I don't have any illegal software or Music on my PC (I have a backup of my sisters stuff which might be a legally grey area in terms of music but I don't use it, it really is just a backup).
My parents taught me to be careful with money (mainly by example) and I genuinely don't care that much about not having videos/music. With games I like to play them fairly seriously and I mostly play strategy games which have a lot of scope for re-playability especially if you include online play.
I agree with this. $20 for just World of Goo seems too much to me. I played the demo and the depth is limited compared to many non-indie games. I paid a reasonable amount in my opinion for the collection which is more than they would have had otherwise. It is not unusual for games to drop massively in price, I personally don't buy new PC games because they are too expensive for me. If you find a steam sale you can pick up great games (e.g. Civ4 and Empire Total War) for fairly cheap (~£7) just a couple or years past their release date.
"When the cellphone was invented, a new word was coined for that too. Why aren't the Brits trying to call it a "telephone" or "smoke signal" or "megaphone" instead?"
You might be interested to know that in the UK people call them mobiles which is short for mobile telephone, some people also use the word phone to refer to a mobile phone as well.
Also from what the Oxford English Dictionary says:
Computer:
1. A person who makes calculations or computations; a calculator, a reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc. Now chiefly hist.
The current usage is actually a conversion of the word because a new word wasn't coined when we switched from people to machines doing the computing.
Your other three examples seem to be correct. However your case is weakened dramatically. I will add a couple more counterexamples to show how common it is to reuse an old word.
Bus has been in continuous usage from early horse drawn models to modern combustion engine (or even electric) designs. Screen has been changed from a thin flat piece of paper/wood to a computer screen.
"Documents should have no more vendor-lock associated with them than image files."
Although I agree with the sentiment in practice there is a huge difference between an image file and a document. An image is a static set of pixels which is run through a compression algorithm and saved. A document needs to store everything needed for editing which means that creating a compatible format from different programs is far more difficult.
On my Ubuntu system changing the dpi works pretty well. Most gtk applications seem to work perfectly, Firefox however just seems to ignore the change in dpi settings. Everythign else that I use frequently was great though. I think the problem is lazy developers using poor quality GUI toolkits because they haven't come across high dpi displays they don't bother testing.
A decent ad provider provides controls which should stop this happening the vast majority of the time. Maybe the odd thing will slip through but that should be unusual. I personally run a website which uses text only adverts because I consider them to be acceptable in terms of bandwidth use and they don't interfere with the website other than being exactly where I put them.
You seem to have missed my point, I am not saying that this legislation is good and necessary, I am saying your arguments against the legislation are flawed in the absolute way you have put them across. Think about murder, theft, etc. All these laws restrict what you can do to protect others.
We gave up on the idea that a society left to its own devices will live in peace and harmony quite some time ago. This idea is also known as anarchy and generally leads to chaos.
Maybe some of the other people in the world might like the effect of the regulations. I would hope that you realise that what you do affects other people, for a start there is the global warming issue which will have huge consequences according to most scientific studies on the subject. Also there is the fact that the world has a limited production capacity for petrol and diesel so if you use more the price goes up making me pay more because you want to waste more in an inefficient car. Laws are to protect other people from your decisions not just yourself.
A couple of things which I noticed in the WSJ review was that the email client lacks local folders, sorting rules and contact groups. Also the web browser lacks tabs. To me these seem like pretty major limitations given the quantity of email I receive and the way I use my browser.
Speeding may not increase accident rates but it increases the damage caused by the accidents. With car-pedestrian accidents there is a 5% chance of death at 20mph, 20% at 30mph, 50% at 35mph and 90% at 40mph. www.devon.gov.uk/speed_limit_flyer-2.pdf
Mini roundabouts usually only have three roads joining, occasionally four. Therefore your signal coming up the the roundabout contains all of the data about which direction you are taking. It is generally less safe to try indicating when going over the mini roundabout because it reduces the control you have by giving you another task. If you are indicatnig right it is clear that you will go right so you can safely leave the indicator on until you have finished turning and have left the roundabout. Obviously never do a U turn on a mini roundabout which is the only possible ambiguity.
The same applies to driving a car as well. My instructer told me to assume all other cars were driven by idiots because some of them will be and you won't be able to tell the difference until they do something dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
"Google denies a report that it is sharing advertising revenues derived from mobile applications on Android smartphones with carrier and handset partners. The search engine maintains the only revenue sharing it engages in is from paying carriers a cut of its search-related advertising sales."
You haven't read your own quote. The quote clearly says that it is about sharing advertising revenues. This actually implies that they are receiving revenue from these sources and are keeping it for themselves rather than paying some of it to the people who make the phones.
If you create a shell script
Then (with wmctrl installed) and the correct width and height set you can easily just add a keyboard shortcut (I use Super-Left and Super-Right) to resize windows to half the screen size.
Why should we have a dock instead of a taskbar? The only advantage I can see is that you can launch an application from it which I solve by having two panels in gnome one with launchers on and the other with a taskbar.
The obvious disadvantage is that having multiple windows from the same program open is awkward with a dock. I need to click/hover on the icon which then pops up a sub menu which I then select the window from. With a task bar I see them both so I just click in one spot and get the window open.
There are some use cases where burn it can happen. At my old school the login screen was burnt onto the monitor because it was showing so much of the time. The screens looked like LCD.
For online banking an infected router is not a problem. There is a secure encrypted and authenticated connection between you and your bank. The problem is software on your PC.
I just had a look at one of them, http://www.stemcellfoundation.ca/ to be precise, I was definitely underwhelmed. For a start it took over 30 seconds to load, I am connected to a University network which gets over 80 mbits so either their servers can't cope with the large page or the page is very large. Either way it is unacceptably slow. Transitions are animated making them slow compared to a normal html page.
There is a scrollable box of text which can be scrolled in precisely one way which is to drag the little round thing on the scrollbar. This compares to a fully functional scrollbar with three navigation options, using my mouses scroll wheel, using cursor keys or Page Up/Down and autoscroll (middle mouse click and scroll). If I am on their web page my mouses back button breaks as does equivalent keyboard shortcuts. I can't open a new tab using ctrl-T. Middle clicking links does nothing when it should open in a new tab. They even made a small text heading the same color as a link (links aren't underlined of course) so it is indistinguishable without rolling over with a mouse (which causes a non standard fade effect on actual links). Hopefully you never want to copy any text because you won't be able to select it. Also the scrolling problems are exacerbated by the fact that on my 1680x1050 monitor I have a nice 530*330 box to read the text in.
So in conclusion usability is a joke since it breaks the vast majority of UI conventions.
There is a useless gimmick of having looping videos of the peoples faces rather than a still photo, adds nothing other than a slightly cool factor when you first visit which I would say is outweighed by the annoyances of the people in the videos shifting uncomfortably plus increased download time.
Trying to sign the charter brings up a nice form which conveniently has none of my saved data like an html form so I have to type everything in myself. You can copy/paste to these boxes though, although with the caveat of my Linux middle click paste not working (I would have been shocked if it had. The auto country filler is quite nice I will admit except for the minor thing where it wipes the box if you click it once it has been filled. Also the font rendering is horrible on the form page for some reason, there seem to be small patches on letter which are faded.
After thoroughly browsing this usability disaster I somehow don't feel much respect for the webbyawards. This is precisely why Flash websites are such a bad move. Flash itself is great for those things which need a richer environment than html can provide, such as games and video and some web applications.
Where?
I see your point. Maybe it is because I am a student but I don't spend money on that kind of stuff either. I get novels from the library, read once for free, take them back. I rarely watch films and don't personally own a DVD. I don't really care about music either. Occasionally I will open up Spotify but most the time I don't play anything or play background instrumental pieces from Jamendo (CC music e.g. Celestial Aeon Project).
As far as I am aware I don't have any illegal software or Music on my PC (I have a backup of my sisters stuff which might be a legally grey area in terms of music but I don't use it, it really is just a backup).
My parents taught me to be careful with money (mainly by example) and I genuinely don't care that much about not having videos/music. With games I like to play them fairly seriously and I mostly play strategy games which have a lot of scope for re-playability especially if you include online play.
I agree with this. $20 for just World of Goo seems too much to me. I played the demo and the depth is limited compared to many non-indie games. I paid a reasonable amount in my opinion for the collection which is more than they would have had otherwise. It is not unusual for games to drop massively in price, I personally don't buy new PC games because they are too expensive for me. If you find a steam sale you can pick up great games (e.g. Civ4 and Empire Total War) for fairly cheap (~£7) just a couple or years past their release date.
"When the cellphone was invented, a new word was coined for that too. Why aren't the Brits trying to call it a "telephone" or "smoke signal" or "megaphone" instead?"
You might be interested to know that in the UK people call them mobiles which is short for mobile telephone, some people also use the word phone to refer to a mobile phone as well.
Also from what the Oxford English Dictionary says:
Computer:
1. A person who makes calculations or computations; a calculator, a reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc. Now chiefly hist.
The current usage is actually a conversion of the word because a new word wasn't coined when we switched from people to machines doing the computing.
Your other three examples seem to be correct. However your case is weakened dramatically. I will add a couple more counterexamples to show how common it is to reuse an old word.
Bus has been in continuous usage from early horse drawn models to modern combustion engine (or even electric) designs.
Screen has been changed from a thin flat piece of paper/wood to a computer screen.
"Documents should have no more vendor-lock associated with them than image files."
Although I agree with the sentiment in practice there is a huge difference between an image file and a document. An image is a static set of pixels which is run through a compression algorithm and saved. A document needs to store everything needed for editing which means that creating a compatible format from different programs is far more difficult.
The article did contain a section on database applications.
As far as I can tell you can. Middle click and crtl-c ctrl-v work fine in everything I can find to test with text boxes. When did this not work?
You do realise that the feature freeze happened on the 17th February?
RSS/Atom are not push. Your RSS reader just regularly checks the feed for updates.
What thought process does it take to follow a sat nav when it instructs you to go off road down a rocky path?
On my Ubuntu system changing the dpi works pretty well. Most gtk applications seem to work perfectly, Firefox however just seems to ignore the change in dpi settings. Everythign else that I use frequently was great though. I think the problem is lazy developers using poor quality GUI toolkits because they haven't come across high dpi displays they don't bother testing.
A decent ad provider provides controls which should stop this happening the vast majority of the time. Maybe the odd thing will slip through but that should be unusual. I personally run a website which uses text only adverts because I consider them to be acceptable in terms of bandwidth use and they don't interfere with the website other than being exactly where I put them.
You seem to have missed my point, I am not saying that this legislation is good and necessary, I am saying your arguments against the legislation are flawed in the absolute way you have put them across. Think about murder, theft, etc. All these laws restrict what you can do to protect others.
We gave up on the idea that a society left to its own devices will live in peace and harmony quite some time ago. This idea is also known as anarchy and generally leads to chaos.
Maybe some of the other people in the world might like the effect of the regulations. I would hope that you realise that what you do affects other people, for a start there is the global warming issue which will have huge consequences according to most scientific studies on the subject. Also there is the fact that the world has a limited production capacity for petrol and diesel so if you use more the price goes up making me pay more because you want to waste more in an inefficient car. Laws are to protect other people from your decisions not just yourself.
A couple of things which I noticed in the WSJ review was that the email client lacks local folders, sorting rules and contact groups. Also the web browser lacks tabs. To me these seem like pretty major limitations given the quantity of email I receive and the way I use my browser.
Traditionally April fools jokes happen on April 1st. Pre-announcing an April fools joke days beforehand is not really acceptable.
Speeding may not increase accident rates but it increases the damage caused by the accidents. With car-pedestrian accidents there is a 5% chance of death at 20mph, 20% at 30mph, 50% at 35mph and 90% at 40mph. www.devon.gov.uk/speed_limit_flyer-2.pdf
Mini roundabouts usually only have three roads joining, occasionally four. Therefore your signal coming up the the roundabout contains all of the data about which direction you are taking. It is generally less safe to try indicating when going over the mini roundabout because it reduces the control you have by giving you another task. If you are indicatnig right it is clear that you will go right so you can safely leave the indicator on until you have finished turning and have left the roundabout. Obviously never do a U turn on a mini roundabout which is the only possible ambiguity.
The same applies to driving a car as well. My instructer told me to assume all other cars were driven by idiots because some of them will be and you won't be able to tell the difference until they do something dumb.