I converse directly with my friends over long and rambling conversations via email on a daily basis. Obviously, browsing facebook for 20 minutes isn't friendship, but talking, debating, sharing viewpoints and intimate experiences is friendship. I see and talk to 100 people face-to-face every day at work, but they are not friends. Friendship is about how you interact, and not about whether you are in the same room as the other person.
You seem convinced that you are more than an expert on friendship than the rest of us, but the more you write the more I think you have no idea what friendship is.
I guess it depends on what you define as 'friends'. I consider friends to be people with whom I have a shared interest, and to whom I converse on a regular basis so I know what they're doing in their life, they know what I'm doing, and we enjoy sharing experiences and so on. Some might consider that doing it via email rather than in person is somehow a reduction in the value of that friendship; I do not.
One of my best friends moved to Australia from the UK, and I still keep in touch with him on a daily basis via email, sharing photos, stories of what each other are up to, experiences and debate. I consider myself far better friends with him, despite the distance and medium of communication, than people with whom I might spend an evening every week or so. I don't see that as 'dialling down' the friendship experience. You might but perhaps that's because you're more needy of physical interaction in order to sustain a friendship.
Horses for courses, difference strokes for different folks, etc.
You're quite, quite wrong. I enjoy my job, find it interesting, mentally stimulating and exciting. That's why I work the hours I do. But I have plenty of time to have rich friendships outside my working life (not to mention a few excellent friendships as part of my working life).
Just because you're unable to maintain friendships via different communication mediums than face-to-face speech, doesn't mean that other people are so restricted. And just because you do a 9-5 job doesn't mean that other people have compromised their life by doing interesting stuff for longer.
Oh, and as a matter of pedantry, I haven't "decimated" my social life, as there is no way that I'd have 10x the social life even if I had no job whatsoever.
What a load of utter tosh. I'm pretty busy. I work an 11-hour day, with an hour commute at each end. I also have busy weekends. So in order to keep up with my friends I share pictures, comments, etc on Facebook during normally dead time (like commuting). My friends are friends, not aquaintences. And the reason I'm so close to them is because I communicate with them daily or hourly - even if I don't physically see them for days or weeks.
In fact, some of my best friends I've known for 11-12 years, and communicate daily via email. I know far more about them than I do about acquaintances I meet at the pub or at work, etc. Some of them I've only met face-to-face two or three times.
Friendship is almost wholly about communication. Whether I sit in a pub drinking beer and talking, or play sports and talk, or watch a movie and talk, communication is the bit that matters. So communicating via email, SMS, facebook, twitter, etc, is just as valid - possibly more so, as I communicate far more electronically than I would ever be bothered to do if I had to get in a car and go meet people week-by-week.
Amusing, but not relevant. Microsoft makes a phone OS (not a very good one, but, nevertheless...). They also partner with a bunch of hardware manufacturers who make phones that run their OS.
By the same token, you could say that Google don't make a phone, since the Nexus is manufactured by HTC.
RTFA, and you'll see it was a refurbished handset. And the article summary is misleading when it says "is selling phones with". This was one instance, one device.
...and you must have missed the part where it's free for a trial period and then after that it's free forever for http, they only lock down https in the free version. Which seems pretty good value to me.
So the solution is what - Google should wait 5 years between OS upgrades? In which case people would be complaining that Google never updates the functionality.
Phones are not computers. Most people upgrade their phones annually, and a lot of consumers don't know about or expect an OS upgrade during that time. I think you're over-egging the pudding on this.
And besides, I still use XP despite Vista and W7 being released in the last few years. XP works just fine, thanks. And the same goes for Android - I know plenty of people for whom 1.6 is just perfect. 2.0 would be nice, but it's not essential.
Erm, the SDK usually hits the streets a couple of months before the firmware does (that's certainly the case with 1.6 and 2.0 - SDK was available about 8-10 weeks before the first devices with that OS version were released. And during that time many/most developers were able to test/update their apps to run with the new OS. So, for the example, by the time Cupcake was installed on most phones, most major Android apps had been upgraded to support it perfectly. Same goes for 2.0.
This process is exactly the same on iPhone as it is for Android - the market knows which OS versions an app supports, and devs get the SDK early and can upgrade the apps for max compatibility before the OS is released.
Plus, the SDK allows apps to target certain versions of the OS and use reflection to test if functionality is available on the device before using it (and degrade gracefully if it doesn't). And the Android auto-update meant that phone users were prompted to install the new update automatically. If devs don't choose to use those tools properly, then their app will fail; that's a loss to the developers, not Google, Android or the end users.
So basically, most of your post is irrelevant bunk.
And, of course, if people are techy enough to understand the differences between 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0, and really want the latter, they can just root their device and install 2.0 if they want. It's hardly complicated. Seems like a pretty goo upgrade path to me.
Have to agree. I've had a Magic and Nexus One, and all the apps I want to use work on both (except Google Earth, which requires 2.x).
And besides, there are, what, 3 major revisions of Android - Cupcake/1.5, Donut/1.6, Eclair/2.1. There's a few devices running 2.0, but they have only been around a couple of months and will undoubtedly move to 2.1 very soon. Most providers are upgrading or planning to upgrade to at least 1.6, and many to 2.x, within the next couple of months.
So in reality, within the next 3-4 months we're talking about a handful of apps not working on a handful of devices running older versions of the OS. People make this out to be a far bigger issue than it actually is.
Perhaps you should be more careful? I've had expensive mobile phones since 1995, and never had one stolen, lost or damaged (and certainly never dropped one into a toilet).
Insurance companies aren't dumb to do this. They probably save money and end up with happier customers.
For example, I bought a laptop imported from Japan (a Fujitsu P-series) before they were available in the UK. Awesome little device, like a netbook - but back in 2001. The device cost around £2k, and had a 233Mhz CPU, optical drive, 60GB disk, 1024x640 screen.
In 2005/2006 the laptop got knocked off a table and the screen broke. Insurers tried to find a replacement screen, but couldn't. In the end they realised that for around £500 they could replace the entire machine with a device twice as powerful in terms of CPU, screen, etc, from the most recent P-series range. Cost of a replacement screen (plus labour to fit it) would probably have been more than the device.
Moore's law means it's usually cheaper to replace electronics with more recent models, and the customer gets an upgrade to boot. It does encourage fraud though.
How about this for an example. I run NewsRob on my Nexus One. It's an offline RSS reader, which periodically downloads the articles and web content in the background. It does this seamlessly and transparently, without me even noticing. When I fire it up, the content is all there, cached locally on the device - so I can read my feeds regardless of whether I have a signal or not.
The closest equivalent to this on iPhone is Bylines. It can't sync in the background, and (I believe) can't run as a scheduled job in the background). So you have to have the download running in the foreground, which means that while it's downloading the content you can't do anything else. Which, frankly, is a total FAIL.
There are many other examples. I have a twitter app which refreshes my twitter feed periodically in the background and notifies me of mentions or messages. I have FoxyRing which runs in the background and every 10 minutes or so it checks the ambient noise level and sets the ringtone volume accordingly. I have a wifi app (Y5) which tracks my location, and if I'm in the same area as an SSID that I've connected to, it automatically enables Wifi (and when I leave that area, it switches wifi off again to save power). Another service I run in the background is 'Screen On', which monitors for certain applications running foreground, and if they're detected it switches the screen timeout to 'infinite'.
Now, some or all of those features, you could argue, could be part of the OS. They could also - with some hoop-jumping - be managed using notifications from the OS location/device state subsystem. However, that all requires the OS vendor to provide those functions. And the RSS download one simply isn't possible at all without it preventing me from using the device to do other things concurrently to the download.
Lots of people say "but I don't need multi-tasking" in justification of the iPhone's draconian limitations. Personally, my device would simply not fit my needs or requirements if it couldn't have background services running....
Have to agree, the new layout is just fine. But more importantly, I don't bother using the full version - I do everything from my Android device. Facebook haven't changed the mobile site (http://m.facebook.com) for over 2 years....
What happened was that the general public wants all the functionality, implemented 6 months ago on hardware which doesn't exist yet. So either Google/Apple/et al test properly, and consumers claim 'disappointment' that it takes 3 years for a device to get to market, or they do the best they can, get it into consumers' hands, and then push out updates whenever the next round of functionality/testing/bugfixing is complete.
Frankly, being an early adopter and a lover of new tech, I know which I'd prefer. Most bugs have workarounds (and, of course, the OSS community can fix or workaround some of them if the platform isn't horrendously locked down).
Re:Woody Woodpecker says, Use Tor + SSL!
on
Hiding From Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". It's about the fact that (as the parent wrote) Google doesn't give a shit about your individual data.
What google are looking for are trends. Not individual behaviour. If I go and visit www.corpse-pictures.com that doesn't help google unless others do. Individuals are outliers on the graph unless there's a lot of people behaving in similar correlated patterns, at which point the data becomes interesting.
People in this world are far too paranoid about their internet data without actually thinking about why they're paranoid. I bet half the people who use Tor to hide their web-surfing have thrown away supermarket receipts into the dustbin without shredding it, or use loyalty cards like Nectar etc when they shop at supermarkets...
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Unauthorized running of scripts on my computer"?
By visiting the site, you authorised it. If you don't want those scripts run, don't visit the site.
It's a bit like saying "unauthorised filming of me by CCTV when I walk into a branch of Sainsburys". If you don't like it, you can do the other thing.
Very good point. Google aren't trying to produce the iPhone-killer, since they make a whole bunch of revenue via search/maps/gmail on the iPhone. What google probably want is a Microsoft-killer and Nokia-killer. There's plenty enough revenue in the smartphone market for 2 players, and Google makes money from both of them....
I don't actually care if somebody knows I use Gmail, and most people can't tell cosmetically from a received email (particularly as I use my own SMTP).
Of course if I really wanted to hide the fact that I use GMail, instead of mail directing straight to Google, I could have an immediate redirect from my non-Google-hosted pop account to my Gmail account. In fact, that's how I used to have it, before Google introduced the ability to specify custom SMTP servers and I migrated to using their infrastructure directly.
"Domain name provider"? Who do you mean by that? I own my domain name, the only service I need is the registration - which is handled by Nominet etc, the same as everyone else uses for their domains. It's pretty safe to say that if they fail, DNS fails, and the entire internet fails - which means my email will become less relevant.
And besides, a friend of mine owns an ISP and manages my registration, so I know I can (if really necessary) update A and MX records at any time night or day.
Really? My firstname@lastname.com email address makes insanely easy to give my email address over the phone or to somebody in a pub. Usually, if they know my name, they don't even have to write it down. Why is that vain? I'd rather that than have to give some obscure name like fred_johnson1237x@somedomain.btinternet.com
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No. You're not listening.
I converse directly with my friends over long and rambling conversations via email on a daily basis. Obviously, browsing facebook for 20 minutes isn't friendship, but talking, debating, sharing viewpoints and intimate experiences is friendship. I see and talk to 100 people face-to-face every day at work, but they are not friends. Friendship is about how you interact, and not about whether you are in the same room as the other person.
You seem convinced that you are more than an expert on friendship than the rest of us, but the more you write the more I think you have no idea what friendship is.
I guess it depends on what you define as 'friends'. I consider friends to be people with whom I have a shared interest, and to whom I converse on a regular basis so I know what they're doing in their life, they know what I'm doing, and we enjoy sharing experiences and so on. Some might consider that doing it via email rather than in person is somehow a reduction in the value of that friendship; I do not.
One of my best friends moved to Australia from the UK, and I still keep in touch with him on a daily basis via email, sharing photos, stories of what each other are up to, experiences and debate. I consider myself far better friends with him, despite the distance and medium of communication, than people with whom I might spend an evening every week or so. I don't see that as 'dialling down' the friendship experience. You might but perhaps that's because you're more needy of physical interaction in order to sustain a friendship.
Horses for courses, difference strokes for different folks, etc.
You're quite, quite wrong. I enjoy my job, find it interesting, mentally stimulating and exciting. That's why I work the hours I do. But I have plenty of time to have rich friendships outside my working life (not to mention a few excellent friendships as part of my working life).
Just because you're unable to maintain friendships via different communication mediums than face-to-face speech, doesn't mean that other people are so restricted. And just because you do a 9-5 job doesn't mean that other people have compromised their life by doing interesting stuff for longer.
Oh, and as a matter of pedantry, I haven't "decimated" my social life, as there is no way that I'd have 10x the social life even if I had no job whatsoever.
What a load of utter tosh. I'm pretty busy. I work an 11-hour day, with an hour commute at each end. I also have busy weekends. So in order to keep up with my friends I share pictures, comments, etc on Facebook during normally dead time (like commuting). My friends are friends, not aquaintences. And the reason I'm so close to them is because I communicate with them daily or hourly - even if I don't physically see them for days or weeks.
In fact, some of my best friends I've known for 11-12 years, and communicate daily via email. I know far more about them than I do about acquaintances I meet at the pub or at work, etc. Some of them I've only met face-to-face two or three times.
Friendship is almost wholly about communication. Whether I sit in a pub drinking beer and talking, or play sports and talk, or watch a movie and talk, communication is the bit that matters. So communicating via email, SMS, facebook, twitter, etc, is just as valid - possibly more so, as I communicate far more electronically than I would ever be bothered to do if I had to get in a car and go meet people week-by-week.
Amusing, but not relevant. Microsoft makes a phone OS (not a very good one, but, nevertheless...). They also partner with a bunch of hardware manufacturers who make phones that run their OS.
By the same token, you could say that Google don't make a phone, since the Nexus is manufactured by HTC.
RTFA, and you'll see it was a refurbished handset. And the article summary is misleading when it says "is selling phones with". This was one instance, one device.
...and you must have missed the part where it's free for a trial period and then after that it's free forever for http, they only lock down https in the free version. Which seems pretty good value to me.
Or even use EasyTether, which is free and doesn't require the device to be rooted.
So the solution is what - Google should wait 5 years between OS upgrades? In which case people would be complaining that Google never updates the functionality.
Phones are not computers. Most people upgrade their phones annually, and a lot of consumers don't know about or expect an OS upgrade during that time. I think you're over-egging the pudding on this.
And besides, I still use XP despite Vista and W7 being released in the last few years. XP works just fine, thanks. And the same goes for Android - I know plenty of people for whom 1.6 is just perfect. 2.0 would be nice, but it's not essential.
Erm, the SDK usually hits the streets a couple of months before the firmware does (that's certainly the case with 1.6 and 2.0 - SDK was available about 8-10 weeks before the first devices with that OS version were released. And during that time many/most developers were able to test/update their apps to run with the new OS. So, for the example, by the time Cupcake was installed on most phones, most major Android apps had been upgraded to support it perfectly. Same goes for 2.0.
This process is exactly the same on iPhone as it is for Android - the market knows which OS versions an app supports, and devs get the SDK early and can upgrade the apps for max compatibility before the OS is released.
Plus, the SDK allows apps to target certain versions of the OS and use reflection to test if functionality is available on the device before using it (and degrade gracefully if it doesn't). And the Android auto-update meant that phone users were prompted to install the new update automatically. If devs don't choose to use those tools properly, then their app will fail; that's a loss to the developers, not Google, Android or the end users.
So basically, most of your post is irrelevant bunk.
And, of course, if people are techy enough to understand the differences between 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0, and really want the latter, they can just root their device and install 2.0 if they want. It's hardly complicated. Seems like a pretty goo upgrade path to me.
Have to agree. I've had a Magic and Nexus One, and all the apps I want to use work on both (except Google Earth, which requires 2.x).
And besides, there are, what, 3 major revisions of Android - Cupcake/1.5, Donut/1.6, Eclair/2.1. There's a few devices running 2.0, but they have only been around a couple of months and will undoubtedly move to 2.1 very soon. Most providers are upgrading or planning to upgrade to at least 1.6, and many to 2.x, within the next couple of months.
So in reality, within the next 3-4 months we're talking about a handful of apps not working on a handful of devices running older versions of the OS. People make this out to be a far bigger issue than it actually is.
As is "CGI-quality". I guess whoever wrote the article summary didn't actually consider what CGI stands for.
You mean there are women here? :-o
Perhaps you should be more careful? I've had expensive mobile phones since 1995, and never had one stolen, lost or damaged (and certainly never dropped one into a toilet).
Insurance companies aren't dumb to do this. They probably save money and end up with happier customers.
For example, I bought a laptop imported from Japan (a Fujitsu P-series) before they were available in the UK. Awesome little device, like a netbook - but back in 2001. The device cost around £2k, and had a 233Mhz CPU, optical drive, 60GB disk, 1024x640 screen.
In 2005/2006 the laptop got knocked off a table and the screen broke. Insurers tried to find a replacement screen, but couldn't. In the end they realised that for around £500 they could replace the entire machine with a device twice as powerful in terms of CPU, screen, etc, from the most recent P-series range. Cost of a replacement screen (plus labour to fit it) would probably have been more than the device.
Moore's law means it's usually cheaper to replace electronics with more recent models, and the customer gets an upgrade to boot. It does encourage fraud though.
How about this for an example. I run NewsRob on my Nexus One. It's an offline RSS reader, which periodically downloads the articles and web content in the background. It does this seamlessly and transparently, without me even noticing. When I fire it up, the content is all there, cached locally on the device - so I can read my feeds regardless of whether I have a signal or not. The closest equivalent to this on iPhone is Bylines. It can't sync in the background, and (I believe) can't run as a scheduled job in the background). So you have to have the download running in the foreground, which means that while it's downloading the content you can't do anything else. Which, frankly, is a total FAIL.
There are many other examples. I have a twitter app which refreshes my twitter feed periodically in the background and notifies me of mentions or messages. I have FoxyRing which runs in the background and every 10 minutes or so it checks the ambient noise level and sets the ringtone volume accordingly. I have a wifi app (Y5) which tracks my location, and if I'm in the same area as an SSID that I've connected to, it automatically enables Wifi (and when I leave that area, it switches wifi off again to save power). Another service I run in the background is 'Screen On', which monitors for certain applications running foreground, and if they're detected it switches the screen timeout to 'infinite'.
Now, some or all of those features, you could argue, could be part of the OS. They could also - with some hoop-jumping - be managed using notifications from the OS location/device state subsystem. However, that all requires the OS vendor to provide those functions. And the RSS download one simply isn't possible at all without it preventing me from using the device to do other things concurrently to the download.
Lots of people say "but I don't need multi-tasking" in justification of the iPhone's draconian limitations. Personally, my device would simply not fit my needs or requirements if it couldn't have background services running....
Have to agree, the new layout is just fine. But more importantly, I don't bother using the full version - I do everything from my Android device. Facebook haven't changed the mobile site (http://m.facebook.com) for over 2 years....
What happened was that the general public wants all the functionality, implemented 6 months ago on hardware which doesn't exist yet. So either Google/Apple/et al test properly, and consumers claim 'disappointment' that it takes 3 years for a device to get to market, or they do the best they can, get it into consumers' hands, and then push out updates whenever the next round of functionality/testing/bugfixing is complete.
Frankly, being an early adopter and a lover of new tech, I know which I'd prefer. Most bugs have workarounds (and, of course, the OSS community can fix or workaround some of them if the platform isn't horrendously locked down).
It's not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". It's about the fact that (as the parent wrote) Google doesn't give a shit about your individual data.
What google are looking for are trends. Not individual behaviour. If I go and visit www.corpse-pictures.com that doesn't help google unless others do. Individuals are outliers on the graph unless there's a lot of people behaving in similar correlated patterns, at which point the data becomes interesting.
People in this world are far too paranoid about their internet data without actually thinking about why they're paranoid. I bet half the people who use Tor to hide their web-surfing have thrown away supermarket receipts into the dustbin without shredding it, or use loyalty cards like Nectar etc when they shop at supermarkets...
"Unauthorized running of scripts on my computer"?
By visiting the site, you authorised it. If you don't want those scripts run, don't visit the site.
It's a bit like saying "unauthorised filming of me by CCTV when I walk into a branch of Sainsburys". If you don't like it, you can do the other thing.
Very good point. Google aren't trying to produce the iPhone-killer, since they make a whole bunch of revenue via search/maps/gmail on the iPhone. What google probably want is a Microsoft-killer and Nokia-killer. There's plenty enough revenue in the smartphone market for 2 players, and Google makes money from both of them....
I don't actually care if somebody knows I use Gmail, and most people can't tell cosmetically from a received email (particularly as I use my own SMTP).
Of course if I really wanted to hide the fact that I use GMail, instead of mail directing straight to Google, I could have an immediate redirect from my non-Google-hosted pop account to my Gmail account. In fact, that's how I used to have it, before Google introduced the ability to specify custom SMTP servers and I migrated to using their infrastructure directly.
"Domain name provider"? Who do you mean by that? I own my domain name, the only service I need is the registration - which is handled by Nominet etc, the same as everyone else uses for their domains. It's pretty safe to say that if they fail, DNS fails, and the entire internet fails - which means my email will become less relevant. And besides, a friend of mine owns an ISP and manages my registration, so I know I can (if really necessary) update A and MX records at any time night or day.
Really? My firstname@lastname.com email address makes insanely easy to give my email address over the phone or to somebody in a pub. Usually, if they know my name, they don't even have to write it down. Why is that vain? I'd rather that than have to give some obscure name like fred_johnson1237x@somedomain.btinternet.com