My personal experience: HTC never released any update for my phone, which was running (a very buggy implementation of) Android 1.6. For half a year after the phone was released, they told us users that they were trying to port Eclair to the phone, and then they dropped any effort, saying that the phone hardware couldn't support it - coincidentally, they launched a new equivalent phone model natively running Froyo.
Then I decided to void my warranty and I installed CyanogeMod on my phone: now I'm running the latest version of Gingerbread, and it runs acceptably well, certainly much better than the buggy Donut rom that HTC had originally put on the phone.
A few hackers, in their spare time, with no documentation about the hardware, and without the software keys theoretically required to obtain full access to it, managed to do what the multinational corporation that designed the phone said was impossible to do. To me, this means that manufacturers do not want you to be able to upgrade your phone's software without buying new hardware for them. Hardware fragmentation, kernel drivers, processing power are just excuses they adduce. If Cyanogen can do it, so HTC/Samsung/Motorola could.
These are the same justification for Sony removing the OtherOS option from the PS3. They're a private company, it's legal, they were forced to do it, they have no obligation not to do it, you have alternatives etc.
The point is not that they CANNOT do it, the point is that they SHOULD NOT, and if they choose to behave that way, then they'll have to withstand people complaining and getting pissed. With great power comes great responsibility.
That said, we'll have to hear Google's version before we can judge.
Firefox is a joke? It doesn't sell user information, it uses less memory than the best open source alternatives, and it has more features. Stop trolling.
And Apache and Mozilla are non-profit organizations.
Please. They've dumped code in the Linux kernel to let Linux run under one of their own products. And they were required to do so by the GPL license. In the meantime, they're suing any company trying to actually use the Linux kernel in commercial products without giving them money.
Microsoft has never really locked down their desktop OS either. It has always been open in a way that it lets you run anything you want. Be it open source or proprietary code.
That's true until now - but things are changing. You'll probably have heard of Microsoft's enforcement of the secure UEFI boot protocol in a way that will make either difficult or impossible for users to run fully open source operating systems on their "designed for Windows" PCs.
- As far as mobiles go, Microsoft already gets lots of money for every Android device sold. Microsoft wins in either case, be it Android or Windows Phone that is selling better.
Let's see if Microsoft will be able to continue extorting money from device manufacturers after their ludicrous patents are tested in courts.
- Visual Studio is much better programming IDE than open source ones, especially when you add visualAssist to it.
Netbeans is better. It's free, it's easy to use, it supports more programming languages, any kind of refactoring / code completion / visual assistance, and it's not bound to Microsoft's inferior C compiler. It's incredible that, in 2011, Microsoft still doesn't fully support C99 and uses DOS code pages for console applications.
- There isn't any open source competitors for Xbox 360. None.
Funny, I hear every day that consoles will disappear because they are being replaced by mobile gaming devices. Most of them running the open source Android platform.
I like the old style (Windows 95) because it's consistent. I don't need to re-learn every application I use, because they all follow the same principles.
The new Windows 7 theme makes switching between windows harder, because what could be done with one click before, now may require two clicks, the second of which has to be applied to an invisible surface that only appears after a certain delay after the first click, which fatigues the eye.
The new Windows 7 buttons mix running applications with launch shortcuts. You can only tell that an application is running because of a semi-transparent border appearing around its icon, which is hard to discern, especially considering that the taskbar is itself transparent and shows the underlying background.
The buttons unexpectedly and unintuitively change their function after they've been clicked: this goes against the user interface principle that one control should have one function. The first click opens an application, the second click will either bring the application to front, send the application to the background, or reveal an hidden box allowing you to choose between different open windows, depending on the window manager state. What if I want to open an Internet Explorer window after I've already opened one? Intuitively, I would click again on the same shortcut that opened the first window. It won't work, and I have to learn that instead what I have to do is to right-click the same icon, which will bring about an hidden box containing a set of application-dependent shortcuts, one of which might let me open a new window.
The whole "hovering" metaphor should be used with care, considering that it can't be applied to touchscreen interfaces which are supposed to become more and more important even on the desktop (surprisingly, Windows 8 relies on "hovering" even more if what we've seen in the developer preview is going to end in the finished product). Moreover, it makes the physical act of moving the mouse do something different than moving the virtual mouse pointer on the screen, which again will surprise most users; consider for example what happens when you hover over an application thumbnail in the window selection panel on Windows 7: the whole computer screen will change, only as a result of having moved the mouse, but the change is an illusion, because the shown image will instantly disappear as soon as you actually try to reach it with the mouse pointer, just like a mirage.
The old design was easier to use and to learn. I admit it was uglier to look at.
And don't forget the reader_sl.exe process that loads Adobe Reader in memory when Windows starts up. So it will slow down any workflow that doesn't include Adobe Reader, and it won't actually make the ones that do use Adobe Reader faster.
Good thing that this technology is not supported on the Linux version;) .
OK, but then you're comparing an existing product, the Vita, which you can go to the store across the street and buy, with an hypothetical, future product that does not exist currently.
Look at the present: consider that you can buy a Nintendo DS, or an Android phone. The Android phone, if it's not too cheap, will probably be more powerful than the DS: and it will have to be A LOT more powerful in order to play comparable software, because unlike the DS it will be running a full operating system, an application VM and so on, as it's designed to do a lot of other things besides gaming.
This notwithstanding, the Android phone will deplete its battery in a few hours of usage (and potentially leave you without a functional phone) while the DS can be moderately used for a week or so. The DS also has "better" games, because it has gaming controls that you can't find on the Android phone, and you will never find them on a phone, again because of conflicting design requirements.
Then you'll also have to consider the fact that a DS will survive in the hands of kids, whereas an high quality phone might have more trouble doing the same, let alone a cheap phone that costs as much or less than a DS. A glass phone such as the iPhone might even be dangerous for children (supposing that you want to trust them with a € 399 phone).
Firstly, you have no idea what my position is, or even if I have one at all: I've only discussed your verbiage, and the facts of the world -- not my own opinions.
My verbiage was not posted isolated - it was in a discussion thread, and is only meaningful in that context. In particular, it was meant to express my conviction that SACD is an obsolete standard and that no company can be seen as "betraying their customers" if they decide not to support it any longer. The fact that you can find 7,405 relics from years ago on sale on a website is true, but it isn't relevant in this discussion, in my opinion. Of course, other people can have a different opinion.
Meanwhile, seeing 7,500 different items for sale is not my understanding of a "limited selection".
7,405 different items are a limited selection if you consider that the whole offering of CDs in the same store is made up of 2,577,381 items. SACDs are 0.29% of the total.
In order to consider the liveliness of the SACD format in 2011, which was the point of my comment, we should take into account how many of those 7,405 items were released in 2011. If you consider that of those 7,405 items, at most 60 of them were released in 2011, the choice drops even more. If, in light of this fact, you consider that my statement "nobody sells SACDs anymore" is false, then I have nothing more to add to convince you.
Are you done yet?
Yes. I think the reader has enough numbers to decide who is wrong and who is right in practice.
I agree that you're climbing mirrors to defend your position that Sony is to be considered evil because they no longer sell game consoles able to read discs that were released around six years ago, encountered no market success, and are no longer manufactured. And with that, I mean that searching for "SACD 2011" on Amazon only returns 60 results most of which aren't actually SACD or were not released in 2011 (the year that is currently on your calendAr).
Of course you can still buy old stuff from the bottom of stores. You can still buy minidiscs (526 results), too.
Please learn to make a point that's accurate, or at least try to understand when an absolute statement is inappropriate.
I'd rather restrict my audience to those that when I say that a product is no longer sold, actually understand that they can still probably buy a limited quantity of that unsold product somewhere on the internet. That is, those that aren't completely devoid of common sense. See you on the next article about the Xbox 360, protesting because it doesn't play minidiscs.
Except that if you need a phone with similar hardware prowess as the Vita, it will cost you 3x, the battery life will be one fifth, and the gaming experience will be much worse because phones haven't got gaming controls.
They did not remove SACD playback. SACD playback was no longer available in new models, because there is no market at all for SACD titles, so it wasn't seen as a useful feature anymore. But your PS3 will keep playing SACD titles forever. Assuming that you really have SACD titles at home, since nobody sells them anymore.
Actually, this "Sony and proprietary formats" meme stopped being true in 2006, when Sony introduced the PS3: it works with off-the-shelf hardware such as USB sticks, USB hard drives, USB keyboards and mice, USB microphones, USB webcams, Bluetooth keyboards, Bluetooth earsets. Its internal hard disk is, guess what, off-the-shelf and can be replaced by the user. The PS3 will play just about any kind of "official" media formats you can feed it using any of the above methods. This openness is unique among its competitors.
The PS3 hardware, with the exception of the Move, is technically superior to any competitor product, so I'm not sure where you get the impression that their products are sub-par.
If you're refering to their competition in the media player market, it's interesting to note that the winner in that sector uses proprietary connectors and a proprietary protocol requiring a proprietary application to make use of the device - so much for people expecting stuff to work across their devices.
What is really stuck in the past is this echo from the 80s about Sony and proprietary formats that on slashdot keeps resounding, and resounding, and resounding.
Are separate processes faster than multiple threads in the same process? And do they use less memory? I thought multiple processes in Chrome were used for robustness, not for speed.
On my computer, instead, Firefox (8) uses less memory than Chrome when it has the same tabs open.
I've never had to close any recent version of Firefox because it consumed multiple gigabytes of memory.
Moreover, Firefox has a sweet tab grouping user interface that is very useful for people keeping many open tabs, that is for those who would suffer more from poor memory management in the browser, and I can't find an equivalent in Chrome.
So, he is slightly off topic because he's talking about a company exploiting the patent system instead of a company that has just finished exploiting the patent system, and this is "enough to be considered flamebait"?
First of all, flamebait and off-topic are two different and orthogonal downmods.
Second, I don't think he's so offtopic as to need obscuration. He's talking about the evils of the patent system, of which this article provides but another evidence. If his comment was flamebait, it was because he pulled in the RDF gratuitously in an arguably flammable way.
Yes, they do. Being able to get sole rightrs on the drug is why tneya re invented.
Or, they could do it in the free market, which is known to minimise prices and maximise availability of goods (at least when its rules are applied to less powerful market actors).
That's what farmers, lawyers, plumbers, engineers, bakers, clerks, programmers, merchants, barbers, bankers, receptionists, architects, truckers, miners, doctors, astronauts, cooks, managers, bricklayers etc. do, more or less. And they wouldn't dream of crossing their arms because there's another entity on the planet who dares to do the same job as them.
It can cost mollions of dollars.
And it returns billions and billions. If there's no private entity willing to spend the initial millions, we could be better off funding millions into public research, which would make its results available to everyone (examples: GPS, TCP/IP, WWW), potentially creating millions of jobs. The public, i.e. the actual people spending the money in the end, would still save, because they would spend millions instead of billions and billions.
Yet another reason to have a cell phone whose software can be built from source by its owner.
As we used to be able to do on dear old PCs, before we were taught that we actually don't need that, that the average user doesn't want that, that we are geeks and should therefore shut up, that plaform lockdown would have led us to a world of everlasting software security, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal experience: HTC never released any update for my phone, which was running (a very buggy implementation of) Android 1.6. For half a year after the phone was released, they told us users that they were trying to port Eclair to the phone, and then they dropped any effort, saying that the phone hardware couldn't support it - coincidentally, they launched a new equivalent phone model natively running Froyo.
Then I decided to void my warranty and I installed CyanogeMod on my phone: now I'm running the latest version of Gingerbread, and it runs acceptably well, certainly much better than the buggy Donut rom that HTC had originally put on the phone.
A few hackers, in their spare time, with no documentation about the hardware, and without the software keys theoretically required to obtain full access to it, managed to do what the multinational corporation that designed the phone said was impossible to do. To me, this means that manufacturers do not want you to be able to upgrade your phone's software without buying new hardware for them. Hardware fragmentation, kernel drivers, processing power are just excuses they adduce. If Cyanogen can do it, so HTC/Samsung/Motorola could.
The point is not that they CANNOT do it, the point is that they SHOULD NOT, and if they choose to behave that way, then they'll have to withstand people complaining and getting pissed. With great power comes great responsibility.
That said, we'll have to hear Google's version before we can judge.
Or of Google Chrome, which hits exactly the very same problem.
And how is this connected to the amount of memory required to link Firefox?
Isn't it like 20 years?
And Apache and Mozilla are non-profit organizations.
Please. They've dumped code in the Linux kernel to let Linux run under one of their own products. And they were required to do so by the GPL license. In the meantime, they're suing any company trying to actually use the Linux kernel in commercial products without giving them money.
That's true until now - but things are changing. You'll probably have heard of Microsoft's enforcement of the secure UEFI boot protocol in a way that will make either difficult or impossible for users to run fully open source operating systems on their "designed for Windows" PCs.
Let's see if Microsoft will be able to continue extorting money from device manufacturers after their ludicrous patents are tested in courts.
Netbeans is better. It's free, it's easy to use, it supports more programming languages, any kind of refactoring / code completion / visual assistance, and it's not bound to Microsoft's inferior C compiler. It's incredible that, in 2011, Microsoft still doesn't fully support C99 and uses DOS code pages for console applications.
Funny, I hear every day that consoles will disappear because they are being replaced by mobile gaming devices. Most of them running the open source Android platform.
The new Windows 7 theme makes switching between windows harder, because what could be done with one click before, now may require two clicks, the second of which has to be applied to an invisible surface that only appears after a certain delay after the first click, which fatigues the eye.
The new Windows 7 buttons mix running applications with launch shortcuts. You can only tell that an application is running because of a semi-transparent border appearing around its icon, which is hard to discern, especially considering that the taskbar is itself transparent and shows the underlying background.
The buttons unexpectedly and unintuitively change their function after they've been clicked: this goes against the user interface principle that one control should have one function. The first click opens an application, the second click will either bring the application to front, send the application to the background, or reveal an hidden box allowing you to choose between different open windows, depending on the window manager state. What if I want to open an Internet Explorer window after I've already opened one? Intuitively, I would click again on the same shortcut that opened the first window. It won't work, and I have to learn that instead what I have to do is to right-click the same icon, which will bring about an hidden box containing a set of application-dependent shortcuts, one of which might let me open a new window.
The whole "hovering" metaphor should be used with care, considering that it can't be applied to touchscreen interfaces which are supposed to become more and more important even on the desktop (surprisingly, Windows 8 relies on "hovering" even more if what we've seen in the developer preview is going to end in the finished product). Moreover, it makes the physical act of moving the mouse do something different than moving the virtual mouse pointer on the screen, which again will surprise most users; consider for example what happens when you hover over an application thumbnail in the window selection panel on Windows 7: the whole computer screen will change, only as a result of having moved the mouse, but the change is an illusion, because the shown image will instantly disappear as soon as you actually try to reach it with the mouse pointer, just like a mirage.
The old design was easier to use and to learn. I admit it was uglier to look at.
Good thing that this technology is not supported on the Linux version ;) .
Look at the present: consider that you can buy a Nintendo DS, or an Android phone. The Android phone, if it's not too cheap, will probably be more powerful than the DS: and it will have to be A LOT more powerful in order to play comparable software, because unlike the DS it will be running a full operating system, an application VM and so on, as it's designed to do a lot of other things besides gaming.
This notwithstanding, the Android phone will deplete its battery in a few hours of usage (and potentially leave you without a functional phone) while the DS can be moderately used for a week or so. The DS also has "better" games, because it has gaming controls that you can't find on the Android phone, and you will never find them on a phone, again because of conflicting design requirements.
Then you'll also have to consider the fact that a DS will survive in the hands of kids, whereas an high quality phone might have more trouble doing the same, let alone a cheap phone that costs as much or less than a DS. A glass phone such as the iPhone might even be dangerous for children (supposing that you want to trust them with a € 399 phone).
Firstly, you have no idea what my position is, or even if I have one at all: I've only discussed your verbiage, and the facts of the world -- not my own opinions.
My verbiage was not posted isolated - it was in a discussion thread, and is only meaningful in that context. In particular, it was meant to express my conviction that SACD is an obsolete standard and that no company can be seen as "betraying their customers" if they decide not to support it any longer. The fact that you can find 7,405 relics from years ago on sale on a website is true, but it isn't relevant in this discussion, in my opinion. Of course, other people can have a different opinion.
Meanwhile, seeing 7,500 different items for sale is not my understanding of a "limited selection".
7,405 different items are a limited selection if you consider that the whole offering of CDs in the same store is made up of 2,577,381 items. SACDs are 0.29% of the total.
In order to consider the liveliness of the SACD format in 2011, which was the point of my comment, we should take into account how many of those 7,405 items were released in 2011. If you consider that of those 7,405 items, at most 60 of them were released in 2011, the choice drops even more. If, in light of this fact, you consider that my statement "nobody sells SACDs anymore" is false, then I have nothing more to add to convince you.
Yes. I think the reader has enough numbers to decide who is wrong and who is right in practice.
Of course you can still buy old stuff from the bottom of stores. You can still buy minidiscs (526 results), too.
I'd rather restrict my audience to those that when I say that a product is no longer sold, actually understand that they can still probably buy a limited quantity of that unsold product somewhere on the internet. That is, those that aren't completely devoid of common sense. See you on the next article about the Xbox 360, protesting because it doesn't play minidiscs.
Look at the dates on them.
Hmm, no.
He's comparing them to UMD discs, that were used on the predecessor of the Vita. And the Vita does have a microsd card slot.
So does the PS Vita, and does the PS3. And they won't run games over them, exactly as Nintendo. What's your point?
With the original firmware and no hacks installed? If not, then the PS3 does run Linux.
Except that if you need a phone with similar hardware prowess as the Vita, it will cost you 3x, the battery life will be one fifth, and the gaming experience will be much worse because phones haven't got gaming controls.
They did not remove SACD playback. SACD playback was no longer available in new models, because there is no market at all for SACD titles, so it wasn't seen as a useful feature anymore. But your PS3 will keep playing SACD titles forever. Assuming that you really have SACD titles at home, since nobody sells them anymore.
The PS3 hardware, with the exception of the Move, is technically superior to any competitor product, so I'm not sure where you get the impression that their products are sub-par.
If you're refering to their competition in the media player market, it's interesting to note that the winner in that sector uses proprietary connectors and a proprietary protocol requiring a proprietary application to make use of the device - so much for people expecting stuff to work across their devices.
What is really stuck in the past is this echo from the 80s about Sony and proprietary formats that on slashdot keeps resounding, and resounding, and resounding.
Are separate processes faster than multiple threads in the same process? And do they use less memory? I thought multiple processes in Chrome were used for robustness, not for speed.
I've never had to close any recent version of Firefox because it consumed multiple gigabytes of memory.
Moreover, Firefox has a sweet tab grouping user interface that is very useful for people keeping many open tabs, that is for those who would suffer more from poor memory management in the browser, and I can't find an equivalent in Chrome.
First of all, flamebait and off-topic are two different and orthogonal downmods.
Second, I don't think he's so offtopic as to need obscuration. He's talking about the evils of the patent system, of which this article provides but another evidence. If his comment was flamebait, it was because he pulled in the RDF gratuitously in an arguably flammable way.
Yes, they do. Being able to get sole rightrs on the drug is why tneya re invented.
Or, they could do it in the free market, which is known to minimise prices and maximise availability of goods (at least when its rules are applied to less powerful market actors).
That's what farmers, lawyers, plumbers, engineers, bakers, clerks, programmers, merchants, barbers, bankers, receptionists, architects, truckers, miners, doctors, astronauts, cooks, managers, bricklayers etc. do, more or less. And they wouldn't dream of crossing their arms because there's another entity on the planet who dares to do the same job as them.
It can cost mollions of dollars.
And it returns billions and billions. If there's no private entity willing to spend the initial millions, we could be better off funding millions into public research, which would make its results available to everyone (examples: GPS, TCP/IP, WWW), potentially creating millions of jobs. The public, i.e. the actual people spending the money in the end, would still save, because they would spend millions instead of billions and billions.
As we used to be able to do on dear old PCs, before we were taught that we actually don't need that, that the average user doesn't want that, that we are geeks and should therefore shut up, that plaform lockdown would have led us to a world of everlasting software security, etc.