The good news is that QT has been moved to an open governance model, and it's still needed for Nokia's dumbphone division, which is not being sold to MS.
...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?
The C64 is probably the reason I became a geek. I'm still not exactly sure if that was a blessing or a curse;) .
The first memories about the C64 that I remember off the top of my head: the smell of cooked plastic it made when it reached temperature, the "FOUND #@#$%&$" message it would spit out if I tried to load a program after having brought the tape a bit too forward, the machine-gun noise that the floppy drive made when it encountered a damaged sector, before starting to blink beyond the flow of time (it usually happened when you had reached the last level of a multi-load game, and it had taken you half a day and an unrepeatable dose of luck to get there).
They bash the tablet for a hundred lines only because:
a) its gps receiver is poor;
b) its bootloader is locked.
Bid deal? The American market leader for the same product category sells devices that are locked as hell and occasionally have defective (main!) antennas. Did techcrunch review those gadgets with the same language?
Then Asus declares that they will unlock the bootloader, thereby invalidating three quarters of the techcrunch article, but its author just adds a post scriptum at the end of the article saying that its point still stands because "Asus has to learn how to properly handle consumer electronics". This sounds like the fable of the wolf and the lamb to me. If Asus manage to release CE stuff with the same price/features ratio that they offered in the PC/components market, I for one will definitely feel properly "handled".
1) Many "approved" android apps can and do modify the system more extensively, it's how a trojan app can send SMS without you knowing - impossible in iOS.
A trojan app can send SMSes only if you give it the permission to. I do recognize that many users won't read the permissions warning when they install an app, so perhaps Android had better display an additional warning dialog box each time a SMS is sent. (I also remember that in the case of Symbian, which worked that way for Java apps, people were annoyed because of the security pop-ups.) Anyway, if an app is caught doing anything in a fraudulent way, it will be yanked from the official market and from the devices that have it already installed.
That's every model, for every OS version.
The information I have tells me it is notthe case. And what about WP7? No jailbreak at all for that.
Apple could shut down jailbreaking if they really wanted to - obviously they do not want to
But Apple do shut down known jailbreaking methods at almost every OS update. It's hackers that continuously find new ways to jailbreak.
is there a jailbreak for iPhone 4S
Yes there is. Google. Have you heard of it? You probably should have thought to use it before wandering so far out of the field of fact where you started.
All I found by Google were scam sites that wanted me to buy shady applications that are supposed to let me jailbreak. Obviously fake, since the upstream hacker blogs tell me that jailbreaking the 4S and the iPad 2 is not currently possible. The very first Google result is even marked by Google as a "harmful site". Next slashdot article: "Fake jailbreak scams spread to iOS"?
My, what bullshit fear mongering you have there Grandmother!
In reality many millions of people jailbreak phones regularly without issue (NO it does not void your warranty).
Have Apple changed their mind since they officially stated that jailbreak does void your warranty?
That was a HTC bug, not an Android one. And it wasn't remotely exploitable. And it didn't permanently cripple the functionality of the phone after the reboot.
Android won't let you install applications coming from outside the market by default. That is, it has the same security design as iOS and WP7 out of the box.
The only difference between Android and the others, is that Android does provide a legal, consistent, approved way for "technical users and those with technical friends" to disable this lock-down and install applications for third parties. It is a conscious and directed choice, because the option can't be enabled without the user explicitly looking for it inside the phone settings applications, and the user is presented with a dialog box explaining the responsibility required by freedom before the option is enabled. Also, the applications you install this way will not bypass Android's security model.
iOS does/not/ provide the user with this possibility - at all. It just happens that some hackers have found a way to violate the lock-down in some of the existing models. It is not guaranteed that any phone you buy will have it (is there a jailbreak for iPhone 4S?), and it is not guaranteed that even if your phone currently has it, it won't lose it in future firmware updates. Plus, it's dangerous, it will break your warranty, and you have to trust people with l33t names that, although they're exploiting a security flaw in your phone, they won't do anything fishy behind your back.
No. The key is that WP7 is a green-field effort (or near to it). That's why it's actually pretty secure and well designed unlike so many other Microsoft products...
Yes, it's so secure that any WP7 phone can be rebooted with a single text message (even from facebook!), and it won't be able to display, receive or send messages after that. Now that's what I call high quality code.
We already had sensationalist press reports about how Intel would displace ARM thanks to the Moorestown chips, that would let us run the unmodified World of Warcraft on our phones, and so on. Result in reality: zero devices using Moorestown shipped.
Somebody will also remember how Larrabee was meant to smother the market of video cards, the rumors that Sony was to build the PS4 upon it, etc. Result in reality: Larrabee shelved.
It's easy for Intel to beat ARM in performance benchmarks - they have been doing this since the beginning. The point is, that they have to beat ARM in power efficiency, and it looks like Medfield isn't quite there yet.
I don't know if I understand the question? The version of Visual Studio bundled with the Windows 8 technical preview appears to compile and run Metro applications just fine. It probably contains a developer's certificate that you can use to self-sign applications that will only run on your computer - it told me something like that the first time I started it, but I didn't investigate further.
A new subset of Linux that is even more limited than Android?
A new push for "apps" just when HTML5 was going to lower the boundaries between applications and web sites?
An easier way for web sites to identify me?
I know I'm grossly over-simplifying, and there are positive aspects for each of the three "bets" that I'm not listing here, but still I don't know if I'm 100% sold to those ideas. Or to the fact that they should be a priority for open source developers.
Microsoft has been steering their developers away from C and C++ for a long time now. Using Visual Studio for pure native projects is a pain. The pre-release Visual Studio contained in the Windows 8 technical preview won't even allow you to write non-Metro applications (or at least they made it so hard that I couldn't find how to do it).
Fortunately, there are alternatives to Visual Studio even on Windows.
I kind of agree with you, but you'll admit that it's much easier to block a killer holding a knife than one having a gun. It's also harder to kill large amounts of people using a cold weapon.
P2P helps people break the law in the very same way as FTP ad HTTP do. If you want to find real-world examples of P2P usage for legal purposes, just try to download some popular operating system image or a MMORPG installer, you'll probably find that they are also offered as P2P downloads because it results in less strain for the content owner's servers and potentially faster downloads for the content consumer.
I'm aware that Windows 95 didn't support ontologies or social desktops;) , but here are a couple of down-to-earth things that I admired in Windows 95 and that I still look for in modern desktop environments:
- Consistent user interface across the whole system, and in particular universal application of the "click - double click - right click - drag" and "icons - folders" paradigms;
- Built-in help system, globally accessible in the same way, covering every single visual element of the user interface;
- The above help system is searchable, indexed and printable;
- Applications have a "desaturated" user interface, that doesn't try to steal the user's attention away from his work with an excessive personality of his own;
- Built-in ability to copy, move, rename, delete files *reliably*, and a completely programmable and user-customizable file interaction system allowing for file-specific actions;
- "Live" view of files and folders, with visual differentiation of hidden, compressed, encrypted files;
- Simple, but fool-proof, way of handling removable media and printers;
- Ability to preview files in-place (e.g. pictures, sounds), with an extensible plugin system to support new file types;
- Ability to abstract the shell namespace to handle compressed files (only for.CAB files, not.ZIP, but that's more a political decision than a technical one) and files over the network;
- A technical and consistent network connections manager, allowing to check the status of network interfaces at a glance (disconnected, sending, receiving...) and to change their parameters in a few clicks, using a generalized interface that does not change needlessly for different network types;
- A simple way to search for files by name, attributes or content, that can be slow but is fail-safe and yelds predictable results;
- The whole system is programmed in a object-oriented, extensible model (COM).
Still, I think that you can make a nice desktop environment without requiring a full-blown MySQL instance to be running all the time, or 4 different programming language runtimes in memory just for the core environment, or generating log files that completely fill your hard drive in a couple of hours. Graphics aside, Windows '95 had probably more features than many of the current DEs - and it ran with 4 MB of RAM.
P.S. I confess that I even *like* the graphic appearance of Windows 95, but I guess that's just me getting old.
You're making an unfair comparison. The first iPhone wasn't even a smartphone in the sense that it wouldn't allow third party applications to be installed - of course its performance were guaranteed, when all the software it ran was perfectly calibrated to run on that specific device by its manufacturer. Install more recent iOS versions on older iDevices, or run applications intended for different screen sizes, and voila lags and sub-optimal adaptation.
The fact that your carrier gives you a way to pay that money spread over 2 years of contract shouldn't matter when comparing its price to other phones (and you can get quality Android phones a for half that price).
Slashdot Mirror
http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/10/21/the-qt-project-is-live/
8 kb instead of 64 kb, and a pokey instead of the SID? It's comparable, and the comparison is definitely unfavourable for the Atari.
...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?
The C64 is probably the reason I became a geek. I'm still not exactly sure if that was a blessing or a curse ;) .
The first memories about the C64 that I remember off the top of my head: the smell of cooked plastic it made when it reached temperature, the "FOUND #@#$%&$" message it would spit out if I tried to load a program after having brought the tape a bit too forward, the machine-gun noise that the floppy drive made when it encountered a damaged sector, before starting to blink beyond the flow of time (it usually happened when you had reached the last level of a multi-load game, and it had taken you half a day and an unrepeatable dose of luck to get there).
The default was just A> back then.
a) its gps receiver is poor;
b) its bootloader is locked.
Bid deal? The American market leader for the same product category sells devices that are locked as hell and occasionally have defective (main!) antennas. Did techcrunch review those gadgets with the same language?
Then Asus declares that they will unlock the bootloader, thereby invalidating three quarters of the techcrunch article, but its author just adds a post scriptum at the end of the article saying that its point still stands because "Asus has to learn how to properly handle consumer electronics". This sounds like the fable of the wolf and the lamb to me. If Asus manage to release CE stuff with the same price/features ratio that they offered in the PC/components market, I for one will definitely feel properly "handled".
1) Many "approved" android apps can and do modify the system more extensively, it's how a trojan app can send SMS without you knowing - impossible in iOS.
A trojan app can send SMSes only if you give it the permission to. I do recognize that many users won't read the permissions warning when they install an app, so perhaps Android had better display an additional warning dialog box each time a SMS is sent. (I also remember that in the case of Symbian, which worked that way for Java apps, people were annoyed because of the security pop-ups.) Anyway, if an app is caught doing anything in a fraudulent way, it will be yanked from the official market and from the devices that have it already installed.
The information I have tells me it is not the case. And what about WP7? No jailbreak at all for that.
But Apple do shut down known jailbreaking methods at almost every OS update. It's hackers that continuously find new ways to jailbreak.
All I found by Google were scam sites that wanted me to buy shady applications that are supposed to let me jailbreak. Obviously fake, since the upstream hacker blogs tell me that jailbreaking the 4S and the iPad 2 is not currently possible. The very first Google result is even marked by Google as a "harmful site". Next slashdot article: "Fake jailbreak scams spread to iOS"?
Have Apple changed their mind since they officially stated that jailbreak does void your warranty?
That was a HTC bug, not an Android one. And it wasn't remotely exploitable. And it didn't permanently cripple the functionality of the phone after the reboot.
The only difference between Android and the others, is that Android does provide a legal, consistent, approved way for "technical users and those with technical friends" to disable this lock-down and install applications for third parties. It is a conscious and directed choice, because the option can't be enabled without the user explicitly looking for it inside the phone settings applications, and the user is presented with a dialog box explaining the responsibility required by freedom before the option is enabled. Also, the applications you install this way will not bypass Android's security model.
iOS does /not/ provide the user with this possibility - at all. It just happens that some hackers have found a way to violate the lock-down in some of the existing models. It is not guaranteed that any phone you buy will have it (is there a jailbreak for iPhone 4S?), and it is not guaranteed that even if your phone currently has it, it won't lose it in future firmware updates. Plus, it's dangerous, it will break your warranty, and you have to trust people with l33t names that, although they're exploiting a security flaw in your phone, they won't do anything fishy behind your back.
Yes, it's so secure that any WP7 phone can be rebooted with a single text message (even from facebook!), and it won't be able to display, receive or send messages after that. Now that's what I call high quality code.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397572,00.asp
Pretty please? With the borg icon and all the rest.
Somebody will also remember how Larrabee was meant to smother the market of video cards, the rumors that Sony was to build the PS4 upon it, etc. Result in reality: Larrabee shelved.
It's easy for Intel to beat ARM in performance benchmarks - they have been doing this since the beginning. The point is, that they have to beat ARM in power efficiency, and it looks like Medfield isn't quite there yet.
I don't know if I understand the question? The version of Visual Studio bundled with the Windows 8 technical preview appears to compile and run Metro applications just fine. It probably contains a developer's certificate that you can use to self-sign applications that will only run on your computer - it told me something like that the first time I started it, but I didn't investigate further.
A new push for "apps" just when HTML5 was going to lower the boundaries between applications and web sites?
An easier way for web sites to identify me?
I know I'm grossly over-simplifying, and there are positive aspects for each of the three "bets" that I'm not listing here, but still I don't know if I'm 100% sold to those ideas. Or to the fact that they should be a priority for open source developers.
The problem is that with C90 you have to write more platform specific code. How do you handle 64-bit integers in C90, for example?
Fortunately, there are alternatives to Visual Studio even on Windows.
And if you think guns are bad, you've obviously never seen somebody get shot with an arrow.
There must be a reason why all the armies from the whole world stopped using arrows a couple of centuries ago.
Seriously, what are you talking about? Arrows? Yes, you can kill somebody even by dropping a piano on him from the 4th floor. But guns make it easier.
I kind of agree with you, but you'll admit that it's much easier to block a killer holding a knife than one having a gun. It's also harder to kill large amounts of people using a cold weapon.
Yet the police need them to prevent bad guys from doing bad things.
P2P helps people break the law in the very same way as FTP ad HTTP do. If you want to find real-world examples of P2P usage for legal purposes, just try to download some popular operating system image or a MMORPG installer, you'll probably find that they are also offered as P2P downloads because it results in less strain for the content owner's servers and potentially faster downloads for the content consumer.
I'm aware that Windows 95 didn't support ontologies or social desktops ;) , but here are a couple of down-to-earth things that I admired in Windows 95 and that I still look for in modern desktop environments: .CAB files, not .ZIP, but that's more a political decision than a technical one) and files over the network;
- Consistent user interface across the whole system, and in particular universal application of the "click - double click - right click - drag" and "icons - folders" paradigms;
- Built-in help system, globally accessible in the same way, covering every single visual element of the user interface;
- The above help system is searchable, indexed and printable;
- Applications have a "desaturated" user interface, that doesn't try to steal the user's attention away from his work with an excessive personality of his own;
- Built-in ability to copy, move, rename, delete files *reliably*, and a completely programmable and user-customizable file interaction system allowing for file-specific actions;
- "Live" view of files and folders, with visual differentiation of hidden, compressed, encrypted files;
- Simple, but fool-proof, way of handling removable media and printers;
- Ability to preview files in-place (e.g. pictures, sounds), with an extensible plugin system to support new file types;
- Ability to abstract the shell namespace to handle compressed files (only for
- A technical and consistent network connections manager, allowing to check the status of network interfaces at a glance (disconnected, sending, receiving...) and to change their parameters in a few clicks, using a generalized interface that does not change needlessly for different network types;
- A simple way to search for files by name, attributes or content, that can be slow but is fail-safe and yelds predictable results;
- The whole system is programmed in a object-oriented, extensible model (COM).
P.S. I confess that I even *like* the graphic appearance of Windows 95, but I guess that's just me getting old.
But then they'd have to develop and maintain an Android-quality featurephone OS.
You're making an unfair comparison. The first iPhone wasn't even a smartphone in the sense that it wouldn't allow third party applications to be installed - of course its performance were guaranteed, when all the software it ran was perfectly calibrated to run on that specific device by its manufacturer. Install more recent iOS versions on older iDevices, or run applications intended for different screen sizes, and voila lags and sub-optimal adaptation.
The fact that your carrier gives you a way to pay that money spread over 2 years of contract shouldn't matter when comparing its price to other phones (and you can get quality Android phones a for half that price).
The 3GS is still being sold today, and it's still quite expensive as a phone. Of couse Apple have to support it.