Chrome, includes Flash and PDF plugins, no extra functionality, 82M installed.
Mozilla, no Flash, no PDF, no extra functionality, 38M.
Opera, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, URL-based adblocker and a bunch of other stuff commonly installed as extensions on FF/Chrome - fits it all in 35M
Can you spell "b-l-o-a-t"?
Opera has Unite built in, which includes a web server, file sharing service, chat and other sharing collaboration tools. Opera has always been a excellent browser that is doomed to be forever underrated.
Frankly I'm waiting for a browser with something like Diaspora built in.
This is old school front line policing taking down criminals responsible for fraud, racketeering, money laundering and worst crime of all internet PIRACY!!
The timing is deliberate, the intention to mislead the public is obvious, however I wonder if the FBI is putting on a big show of how this real-world work can't be replaced by censorship.
The internet is an intangible end-to-end network with no storage, no brains and no memory. No matter what kind of internet connected service you use you are connecting across the internet from your equipment to some physical equipment somewhere else on planet earth. There is no such thing as cyberspace, although politicians seem to think so. Any illicit activity "on the internet" is still actually taking place in the real world with some meat bag person running it. So if the crimes still real world, why fight it with censorship? This seems to be the problem in understanding the politicians and their lobbyist masters have.
To use the car analogy, censoring the internet makes as much sense to setting up roadblocks to search public vehicles as they go about their business, and the purpose of this would be to prevent the movement of stolen goods. Burglaries and theft are a huge problem in society, that have always been there as a background noise to day-to-day life, but we aren't destroying civil liberties to try and stop it once and for all. Nor are we doing it by an absurd method such as censorship - so much industry depends on the movement of vehicle traffic, which is why we don't censor traffic, mail, phone calls.
Crime is a symptom not a disease.
Piracy is a symptom not a disease.
Right now we're being force-fed some particularly nasty painkillers to treat a headache.
I keep seeing train-wrecks of wikis. Especially first hand, with one I set up. Wikis work so well with online communities and with Wikipedia because of the mindset of it's users and editors. You will not find this collaborative, initiative-taking, creative, mindset among your initiative-free cubical farm.
Wikis really shine as a knowledge base when you have a group of people using as a collaborative tool to keep shit documented. Relying on one for your own documentation however is a special form of self torture. Personaly I think wikis seldom work well in IT (except perhaps in edgy startups). It ends up being a bog standard corporate intranet that a few people update. Or in the case of the OP, a terrible way to do what Word and Excel do better: Plain Old Documentation.
A wiki is intended to consist of be concise and pertinent, hyperlinked and searchable useful information, and to be just as easy to rapidly update by all participants. (Proper documentation and media would be linked or attached, and topics short and heavily hyperlinked). It's also hardly the last word on technical matters in your organisation. So, considering all that, are you doing wiki right?
It doesn't really work for anything else. In my case, a wiki I set up, nobody really seemed to use it, and were actually afraid to write anything. In your case you have no one else using it. The problem was the people it was for are your typical IT worker, who gets little recognition for initiative, and doesn't find taking initiative to be it's own reward. Far better with a corporate intranet.
You really really need to make good design decisions early on, otherwise once your too far down the path you can't go back and change fundamental decisions, at least not without trashing it all and starting again, or nursing along a steaming heap of fail.
You also need rules, since you can't truly enforce rules (only delude yourself that you can when all you can do is punish breaches), the behavior needs to be an emergent property of how your wiki runs. Set an example: People will see how things have been done so far and copy that style. Give it thought.
Now, you want do's and dont's?
Don't put too much in some wiki pages.
Don't too little in others.
Do link them like crazy. Got tags or keywords? Go nuts with them.
Combine content first bashed out on the wiki into proper technical documents.
Fix your search. Put the search box up front on your main page
Don't overloaded the wiki with things that really didn't need to be there, should be obvious, pure signal to noise ratio.
Now, wikicraft out of the way. As a lone IT guy:
Do write it just good enough to get yourself out of trouble, if and when, you forget shit. Leave gaps.
Do write just bad enough to fuck with the head of your future replacement(s). Strategically placed gaps.
Do write sufficiently useful in the event that you are kept on and management decides to get you some colleagues.Don't turn gaps into a hole for yourself.
Friend of mine is in a wheelchair. Doesn't give a fuck about disabled parking spaces, parks anywhere, wheels along happily. This may contribute to the appearance of disabled parks being apparently empty.
He also finds it ironic, that there are disabled parks near supermarkets and department stores, fundamentally the kinds of stores where you'll be covering quite a distance moving around a large complex, there's not really much effort saved by having a disabled park close to the door.
Before anyone claims iOS is "secure" and free from malware, Chris Miller, a security researcher managed to get a malicious app APPROVED by Apple, then go on to demonstrate it taking over a phone. IMHO Apples process helps but, actually lulls users into a false sense of security, which undoes some of the benefits. Security has always been 90% a user education problem. Apples actually made some of that worse.
(Nevermind that objective-C is an obscure language and Apple just could feasibly review every single line of code. It's not logistically possible.)
Android has a pretty sophisticated security model, compared to anything running the desktop space. Actual root never needs to be given up for a huge range of modifications to the system. There's policy based access so users can see and restricted what apps will have access to. Apps also run in their own userid and can be restricted from accessing the users data. Brilliant stuff.
So if the platform has malware on it, and it's the most secure thing out there in the mainstream... then what is wrong?
Due to it's popularity Android is a juicy target for the malware ecosystem, and like natural ecosystems, it'll adapt to any hardened defenses if there's nourishment to be had. Google was silly to not fully anticipate this.
For now there is no actual need for anti-virus anti-malware tools on Android for most users. But as always, the problem is a user education problem.
Hackers tend to be industry professionals, or become industry professionals, the very people who make these gadgets.
The extreme end result of too much trusted computing is that too few people would understand how all this stuff works, and there would be too few engineers to make this stuff. One could imagine the worst case scenario of a technological civilization where nobody understands the technology created generations back anymore and it all seems to work like magic and pop out of magic automated factories. Until one day it just stops and nobody knows how to fix it. Cory doesn't do too good-er job of communicating this, but we need hack-able gadgets so people can have the next generation of engineers and developers that make everything work.
Attack learning at this end and it has economic consequences.
If we can't make the argument for general purpose computing then we get what we deserve.
Most users never wanted freedom, they wanted to get work done or enjoy themselves. Unfortunately you don't need freedom for that. This is why the loss of basic and HyperCard doesn't matter.
You want proof. I humbly present to you : The Internet*
*As the sum of all human communications and computational power connected to it. Needs no further elaboration. General purpose computing has made our technological, economic, scientific and cultural civilization what it is now.
Lord knows I have a million and one uses for cheap tablets. I could stick them to the back of the seats in the car, to shut up the kids in a long road trip. Stick one to my dashboard and connect it to a bluetooth ODB-II dongle. I would stick one to the front of the fridge to turn it into a new smart fridge. Hell, duct tape them to anything to smarten it up.
It would also make a hella good universal remote for the lounge.
Problem is now that tablets are spiffy high price gadgets with premium hardware and spiffy graphics that cost the same as a entry level laptop. I'd have one tablet to do all those things and have to carry it with me. Things will change radically when tablets really do become as cheap as they should be. Cheap enough and we'll start covering surfaces with them.
All the interface animations and physical metaphor graphics (brushed metal, wood grain - Apple's microsoft bob era design philosophy), but after a while it's no benefit and a small waste of your time and battery power every time you watch a 500ms transition animation. They just get in the way and in the end I'd rather have more battery life/response/cheaper hardware.
I really cannot wait to get my hands on a useful $99 or less tablet that actually doesn't look good, is rugged and doesn't have fancy graphics.
That's the job of an entire team, all for the pay grade of your boss's nephew who's been to put in the IT department for the summer to get IT work experience. You know the worker. Even with the privilege of working for someone like Hawking, that salary isn't going to retain someone for long, but 12 months and they are back to advertising the position again.
... what need would they have of anything at the bottom of a energetically expensive gravity well? Covering interstellar distance at less than light speed necessitates adaptation to micro-gravity. Covering interstellar distance faster than light would require manipulating the laws of physics in a way that artificial gravity wouldn't seem difficult. So you'd eliminate the need to cater for fleshy gravity-adapted bodies that suffer in microgravity. Either way the technological level required for these feats makes biological engineering or mind uploading etc seem trivial. It's all moot if they decide to clean up after themselves, and finally with all that technology they would also find it rather easy to stay hidden entirely, as they do all the science on us they want. (Bare in mind we do similar things with wildlife, studying them without disturbing them).
If they really needed to mine some in-system resources, they would have mined asteroids. HINT Look for asteroid mining and weird shit left behind at Lagrange points.
It's already unlikely but I seriously doubt any alien artifacts or footprints would be found on the moon, even if they had visited. At best perhaps a unexplained scoop mark or bore hole where a sample was taken by some automated probe. Hardly great evidence of ET, just weird and tantalizing. As for Earth, ET may not want to interfere. Much as these days we try not to disturb wildlife, prefer only to investigate and observe (much more scientific value in a pristine environment than one that has been contaminated). They may also be weary of leaving any unmistakable trace of anything extraterrestrial, especially on such an obvious destination (moon) for a fledgling space-faring civilization to stumble upon. Historically contact between previously isolated cultures of different technological level didn't turn out so well.
I think aliens showing up in fleshy bodies is by far the least likely ET contact scenario. Right up there with finding some of their refuse they dumped in a crater on our moon. Somewhere down the list, finding trojan asteroids mysteriously stripped of particular metals or organics. I support SETI in principal, but I'm just realistic: if aliens were here, there's little reason we'd be aware of it, even if we went looking.
It stands to reason that intelligent ETs will have a strong desire to find other life and actually send out missions to make contact, and at very least survey it's sky for other habitable worlds. I'd put money down on the fact we've probably already been observed, in great detail.
A hint for the SETI guys: don't look at the moon, start looking closely for near-earth asteroids that buzz us on unusual trajectories, because it could be staring back.
Well sure, but Samsung has sold about 15 million Samsung Galaxy S2s in 9 months. That's impressive for ANY gadget, and far ahead of some iStuff releases, let alone one from a manufacturer of a number of Android phone models, along with their non-Android offerings, in a "crowded" market place. Actually the market is still growing like crazy.
The pie is sliced in to many pieces, but it's a freakin huge pie these days.
Trichotomy: You'll hate it again because you can't find the apple power you travel or the one reseller over charges. Oh you better be getting there by cruise ship because NO way would these be allowed on a plane.
All the phones I've owned, at least 10 of them have been obsolete before I had them. I don't have the expectation that my phone has the latest OS. I am currently using a work-issued blackberry curve 9300. People chuckle at it, but it is functional enough I don't spring for a second phone.
I was hoping Google would be good about backwards-compatible updates but I am not surprised. Hardware changes so much it seems hard to make the OS compatible across all platforms. I don't get why people are so worked up about it. Your phone does what it does when you were all excited about it a few months ago, what's the big deal?
Dare I say, we're all too obsessed with keeping up the latest and greatest we miss that what we have right now is probably just fine for our needs. Unless money is no object (how realistic is that in a recession) there really isn't much need to upgrade as soon as the next big thing is available in a few months.
I remember an era when I'd only consider buying a new cellphone once every two years. I could easily upgrade my android phone to whatever is the top phone every 4-5 months, but that's just silly.
IMHO the pace of Android updates is just fine. The platform is making terrific progress, but the individual doesn't necessarily need to ride the bleeding edge.
The solution to that is not "let Google control things instead!" The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves. People should not be forbidden from upgrading their phone's software any more than they should be forced to do so -- just like nobody is forced to upgrade the software on their PC if they do not want to (and plenty of people have reasons for not wanting to upgrade). Instead of talking about how to give Google control over everyone's Android phone, we should be talking about ways to give the users themselves control.
Google makes sure there is a pure android experience on the market (Nexus One, S, Galaxy Nexus) as a benchmark, to kind of show carriers how it should be done. It's actually a clever way to discourage bloat by showing consumers what to demand.
Why is anyone surprised? A pledge, not backed up by, say, a money-back guarantee, is meaningless. If these people could get a refund for their phones if they weren't updated, the "pledge" would have teeth. This is why nobody trusts companies who pledge not to sue over patents. This is why people didn't trust AT&T about their merger pledges. Pledges are just for PR and they mean nothing.
Money, yes, this is all about under resourcing in development. Where ever I hear about updates being too slow to come to $any_software_platform I immediately too little has been invested development and testing, at least too little compared to the scale of the task. Little reason to trust then.
The modding community gets new versions of OSes on to devices fast and this is in a fragmented environment. A lot of carriers and OEMs would do well to take a look at how those guys do it because they are doing something right.
There is actually a lot of good science out there about human interfaces, you can dredge up lots of papers on it if you search. Otherwise it seems to be invisible.
(These notes taken from a notepad I have titled "My computer illiterate boss once did:")
1. Take a photo of the iPad screen.
2. Connect camera to a Laptop and download photo.
3. Connect laptop to the LAN, email the photo to your desktop PC
4. Go to your PC from your PC open the photo in the viewer.
5. Copy the photo. Paste it into a word document.
6. Print the word document. Your done.
7. Optional step: Fax it to the intended recipient, or if the printer/scanner has a scan-to-email function use that.
I hope this helps you. This kind of thing certainly helped people my former workplace at least feel productive.
It's sad to see these once-great projects fall away like this, solely because failed web designers started trying to apply their failed web design techniques to desktop applications.
As someone trained in web design (and failed myself along with others, then changed industry) I nod knowingly at their failure. Further, if I was to teach design now I'd use Gnome Shell as a working example of how not to design a modern UI, it's full of mistakes and poor decisions, things that just don't work properly and in the midst of all this "innovation" there are simple standard mistakes the evergreen shit-that-needs-fixing (don't we all have a mental list of pet hates?) that have always been there in GUIs like some kind of tradition. Hmm perhaps it has some use as a teaching tool and cautionary tale.
I suppose that it's a self-correcting problem, however. Software projects like GNOME 3 and Firefox 4+ just don't end up surviving because they lost the users who formerly made them great.
That's the problem with such open source software projects, they can continue as long as coders want to participate, they really don't actually need anyone to use the software. They are certainly demonstrating they don't care about users.
Yes having a cool app that applies effects to your photos now is content generation. Soon kids will just ask Siri or something like it to do it for them, and be perplexed by old geeks in retirement homes talking about what was really like to have admin privileges to a computing device with user serviceable parts inside.
Back in my day, you see, we spent hours doing that manually with filters in photoshop on powerful workstations, nowadays kids tap a few buttons and think they are 'creative'.
Slashdot Mirror
Define "extra crap".
Chrome, includes Flash and PDF plugins, no extra functionality, 82M installed. Mozilla, no Flash, no PDF, no extra functionality, 38M. Opera, no Flash, no PDF, built-in news reader/mail, URL-based adblocker and a bunch of other stuff commonly installed as extensions on FF/Chrome - fits it all in 35M
Can you spell "b-l-o-a-t"?
Opera has Unite built in, which includes a web server, file sharing service, chat and other sharing collaboration tools. Opera has always been a excellent browser that is doomed to be forever underrated.
Frankly I'm waiting for a browser with something like Diaspora built in.
This is old school front line policing taking down criminals responsible for fraud, racketeering, money laundering and worst crime of all internet PIRACY!!
The timing is deliberate, the intention to mislead the public is obvious, however I wonder if the FBI is putting on a big show of how this real-world work can't be replaced by censorship.
The internet is an intangible end-to-end network with no storage, no brains and no memory. No matter what kind of internet connected service you use you are connecting across the internet from your equipment to some physical equipment somewhere else on planet earth. There is no such thing as cyberspace, although politicians seem to think so. Any illicit activity "on the internet" is still actually taking place in the real world with some meat bag person running it. So if the crimes still real world, why fight it with censorship? This seems to be the problem in understanding the politicians and their lobbyist masters have.
To use the car analogy, censoring the internet makes as much sense to setting up roadblocks to search public vehicles as they go about their business, and the purpose of this would be to prevent the movement of stolen goods. Burglaries and theft are a huge problem in society, that have always been there as a background noise to day-to-day life, but we aren't destroying civil liberties to try and stop it once and for all. Nor are we doing it by an absurd method such as censorship - so much industry depends on the movement of vehicle traffic, which is why we don't censor traffic, mail, phone calls.
Crime is a symptom not a disease.
Piracy is a symptom not a disease.
Right now we're being force-fed some particularly nasty painkillers to treat a headache.
http://techland.time.com/2012/01/05/sopa-what-if-google-facebook-and-twitter-went-offline-in-protest/ It's actually being seriously talked about.
I keep seeing train-wrecks of wikis. Especially first hand, with one I set up. Wikis work so well with online communities and with Wikipedia because of the mindset of it's users and editors. You will not find this collaborative, initiative-taking, creative, mindset among your initiative-free cubical farm.
Wikis really shine as a knowledge base when you have a group of people using as a collaborative tool to keep shit documented. Relying on one for your own documentation however is a special form of self torture. Personaly I think wikis seldom work well in IT (except perhaps in edgy startups). It ends up being a bog standard corporate intranet that a few people update. Or in the case of the OP, a terrible way to do what Word and Excel do better: Plain Old Documentation.
A wiki is intended to consist of be concise and pertinent, hyperlinked and searchable useful information, and to be just as easy to rapidly update by all participants. (Proper documentation and media would be linked or attached, and topics short and heavily hyperlinked). It's also hardly the last word on technical matters in your organisation. So, considering all that, are you doing wiki right?
It doesn't really work for anything else. In my case, a wiki I set up, nobody really seemed to use it, and were actually afraid to write anything. In your case you have no one else using it. The problem was the people it was for are your typical IT worker, who gets little recognition for initiative, and doesn't find taking initiative to be it's own reward. Far better with a corporate intranet.
You really really need to make good design decisions early on, otherwise once your too far down the path you can't go back and change fundamental decisions, at least not without trashing it all and starting again, or nursing along a steaming heap of fail.
You also need rules, since you can't truly enforce rules (only delude yourself that you can when all you can do is punish breaches), the behavior needs to be an emergent property of how your wiki runs. Set an example: People will see how things have been done so far and copy that style. Give it thought.
Now, you want do's and dont's?
Don't put too much in some wiki pages.
Don't too little in others.
Do link them like crazy. Got tags or keywords? Go nuts with them.
Combine content first bashed out on the wiki into proper technical documents.
Fix your search. Put the search box up front on your main page
Don't overloaded the wiki with things that really didn't need to be there, should be obvious, pure signal to noise ratio.
Now, wikicraft out of the way. As a lone IT guy:
Do write it just good enough to get yourself out of trouble, if and when, you forget shit. Leave gaps.
Do write just bad enough to fuck with the head of your future replacement(s). Strategically placed gaps.
Do write sufficiently useful in the event that you are kept on and management decides to get you some colleagues.Don't turn gaps into a hole for yourself.
C:\> ... To a whole generation of kids, your just drawing odd smiley faces.
Friend of mine is in a wheelchair. Doesn't give a fuck about disabled parking spaces, parks anywhere, wheels along happily. This may contribute to the appearance of disabled parks being apparently empty.
He also finds it ironic, that there are disabled parks near supermarkets and department stores, fundamentally the kinds of stores where you'll be covering quite a distance moving around a large complex, there's not really much effort saved by having a disabled park close to the door.
Before anyone claims iOS is "secure" and free from malware, Chris Miller, a security researcher managed to get a malicious app APPROVED by Apple, then go on to demonstrate it taking over a phone. IMHO Apples process helps but, actually lulls users into a false sense of security, which undoes some of the benefits. Security has always been 90% a user education problem. Apples actually made some of that worse.
(Nevermind that objective-C is an obscure language and Apple just could feasibly review every single line of code. It's not logistically possible.)
Android has a pretty sophisticated security model, compared to anything running the desktop space. Actual root never needs to be given up for a huge range of modifications to the system. There's policy based access so users can see and restricted what apps will have access to. Apps also run in their own userid and can be restricted from accessing the users data. Brilliant stuff.
So if the platform has malware on it, and it's the most secure thing out there in the mainstream... then what is wrong?
Due to it's popularity Android is a juicy target for the malware ecosystem, and like natural ecosystems, it'll adapt to any hardened defenses if there's nourishment to be had. Google was silly to not fully anticipate this.
For now there is no actual need for anti-virus anti-malware tools on Android for most users. But as always, the problem is a user education problem.
Hackers tend to be industry professionals, or become industry professionals, the very people who make these gadgets.
The extreme end result of too much trusted computing is that too few people would understand how all this stuff works, and there would be too few engineers to make this stuff. One could imagine the worst case scenario of a technological civilization where nobody understands the technology created generations back anymore and it all seems to work like magic and pop out of magic automated factories. Until one day it just stops and nobody knows how to fix it. Cory doesn't do too good-er job of communicating this, but we need hack-able gadgets so people can have the next generation of engineers and developers that make everything work.
Attack learning at this end and it has economic consequences.
If we can't make the argument for general purpose computing then we get what we deserve.
Most users never wanted freedom, they wanted to get work done or enjoy themselves. Unfortunately you don't need freedom for that. This is why the loss of basic and HyperCard doesn't matter.
You want proof. I humbly present to you : The Internet*
*As the sum of all human communications and computational power connected to it. Needs no further elaboration. General purpose computing has made our technological, economic, scientific and cultural civilization what it is now.
Lord knows I have a million and one uses for cheap tablets. I could stick them to the back of the seats in the car, to shut up the kids in a long road trip. Stick one to my dashboard and connect it to a bluetooth ODB-II dongle. I would stick one to the front of the fridge to turn it into a new smart fridge. Hell, duct tape them to anything to smarten it up.
It would also make a hella good universal remote for the lounge.
Problem is now that tablets are spiffy high price gadgets with premium hardware and spiffy graphics that cost the same as a entry level laptop. I'd have one tablet to do all those things and have to carry it with me. Things will change radically when tablets really do become as cheap as they should be. Cheap enough and we'll start covering surfaces with them.
All the interface animations and physical metaphor graphics (brushed metal, wood grain - Apple's microsoft bob era design philosophy), but after a while it's no benefit and a small waste of your time and battery power every time you watch a 500ms transition animation. They just get in the way and in the end I'd rather have more battery life/response/cheaper hardware.
I really cannot wait to get my hands on a useful $99 or less tablet that actually doesn't look good, is rugged and doesn't have fancy graphics.
That's the job of an entire team, all for the pay grade of your boss's nephew who's been to put in the IT department for the summer to get IT work experience. You know the worker. Even with the privilege of working for someone like Hawking, that salary isn't going to retain someone for long, but 12 months and they are back to advertising the position again.
... what need would they have of anything at the bottom of a energetically expensive gravity well? Covering interstellar distance at less than light speed necessitates adaptation to micro-gravity. Covering interstellar distance faster than light would require manipulating the laws of physics in a way that artificial gravity wouldn't seem difficult. So you'd eliminate the need to cater for fleshy gravity-adapted bodies that suffer in microgravity. Either way the technological level required for these feats makes biological engineering or mind uploading etc seem trivial. It's all moot if they decide to clean up after themselves, and finally with all that technology they would also find it rather easy to stay hidden entirely, as they do all the science on us they want. (Bare in mind we do similar things with wildlife, studying them without disturbing them).
If they really needed to mine some in-system resources, they would have mined asteroids. HINT Look for asteroid mining and weird shit left behind at Lagrange points.
It's already unlikely but I seriously doubt any alien artifacts or footprints would be found on the moon, even if they had visited. At best perhaps a unexplained scoop mark or bore hole where a sample was taken by some automated probe. Hardly great evidence of ET, just weird and tantalizing. As for Earth, ET may not want to interfere. Much as these days we try not to disturb wildlife, prefer only to investigate and observe (much more scientific value in a pristine environment than one that has been contaminated). They may also be weary of leaving any unmistakable trace of anything extraterrestrial, especially on such an obvious destination (moon) for a fledgling space-faring civilization to stumble upon. Historically contact between previously isolated cultures of different technological level didn't turn out so well.
I think aliens showing up in fleshy bodies is by far the least likely ET contact scenario. Right up there with finding some of their refuse they dumped in a crater on our moon. Somewhere down the list, finding trojan asteroids mysteriously stripped of particular metals or organics. I support SETI in principal, but I'm just realistic: if aliens were here, there's little reason we'd be aware of it, even if we went looking.
It stands to reason that intelligent ETs will have a strong desire to find other life and actually send out missions to make contact, and at very least survey it's sky for other habitable worlds. I'd put money down on the fact we've probably already been observed, in great detail.
A hint for the SETI guys: don't look at the moon, start looking closely for near-earth asteroids that buzz us on unusual trajectories, because it could be staring back.
Well sure, but Samsung has sold about 15 million Samsung Galaxy S2s in 9 months. That's impressive for ANY gadget, and far ahead of some iStuff releases, let alone one from a manufacturer of a number of Android phone models, along with their non-Android offerings, in a "crowded" market place. Actually the market is still growing like crazy.
The pie is sliced in to many pieces, but it's a freakin huge pie these days.
Trichotomy: You'll hate it again because you can't find the apple power you travel or the one reseller over charges. Oh you better be getting there by cruise ship because NO way would these be allowed on a plane.
WLAN parties never caught on.
Sure, as long as the wine is free as in beer.
All the phones I've owned, at least 10 of them have been obsolete before I had them. I don't have the expectation that my phone has the latest OS. I am currently using a work-issued blackberry curve 9300. People chuckle at it, but it is functional enough I don't spring for a second phone. I was hoping Google would be good about backwards-compatible updates but I am not surprised. Hardware changes so much it seems hard to make the OS compatible across all platforms. I don't get why people are so worked up about it. Your phone does what it does when you were all excited about it a few months ago, what's the big deal?
Dare I say, we're all too obsessed with keeping up the latest and greatest we miss that what we have right now is probably just fine for our needs. Unless money is no object (how realistic is that in a recession) there really isn't much need to upgrade as soon as the next big thing is available in a few months.
I remember an era when I'd only consider buying a new cellphone once every two years. I could easily upgrade my android phone to whatever is the top phone every 4-5 months, but that's just silly.
IMHO the pace of Android updates is just fine. The platform is making terrific progress, but the individual doesn't necessarily need to ride the bleeding edge.
The solution to that is not "let Google control things instead!" The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves. People should not be forbidden from upgrading their phone's software any more than they should be forced to do so -- just like nobody is forced to upgrade the software on their PC if they do not want to (and plenty of people have reasons for not wanting to upgrade). Instead of talking about how to give Google control over everyone's Android phone, we should be talking about ways to give the users themselves control.
Google makes sure there is a pure android experience on the market (Nexus One, S, Galaxy Nexus) as a benchmark, to kind of show carriers how it should be done. It's actually a clever way to discourage bloat by showing consumers what to demand.
Why is anyone surprised? A pledge, not backed up by, say, a money-back guarantee, is meaningless. If these people could get a refund for their phones if they weren't updated, the "pledge" would have teeth. This is why nobody trusts companies who pledge not to sue over patents. This is why people didn't trust AT&T about their merger pledges. Pledges are just for PR and they mean nothing.
Money, yes, this is all about under resourcing in development. Where ever I hear about updates being too slow to come to $any_software_platform I immediately too little has been invested development and testing, at least too little compared to the scale of the task. Little reason to trust then.
The modding community gets new versions of OSes on to devices fast and this is in a fragmented environment. A lot of carriers and OEMs would do well to take a look at how those guys do it because they are doing something right.
I say this half jokingly and half seriously.
That'll get you two kinds of mod points.
There is actually a lot of good science out there about human interfaces, you can dredge up lots of papers on it if you search. Otherwise it seems to be invisible.
(These notes taken from a notepad I have titled "My computer illiterate boss once did:")
1. Take a photo of the iPad screen.
2. Connect camera to a Laptop and download photo.
3. Connect laptop to the LAN, email the photo to your desktop PC
4. Go to your PC from your PC open the photo in the viewer.
5. Copy the photo. Paste it into a word document.
6. Print the word document. Your done.
7. Optional step: Fax it to the intended recipient, or if the printer/scanner has a scan-to-email function use that.
I hope this helps you. This kind of thing certainly helped people my former workplace at least feel productive.
It's sad to see these once-great projects fall away like this, solely because failed web designers started trying to apply their failed web design techniques to desktop applications.
As someone trained in web design (and failed myself along with others, then changed industry) I nod knowingly at their failure. Further, if I was to teach design now I'd use Gnome Shell as a working example of how not to design a modern UI, it's full of mistakes and poor decisions, things that just don't work properly and in the midst of all this "innovation" there are simple standard mistakes the evergreen shit-that-needs-fixing (don't we all have a mental list of pet hates?) that have always been there in GUIs like some kind of tradition. Hmm perhaps it has some use as a teaching tool and cautionary tale.
I suppose that it's a self-correcting problem, however. Software projects like GNOME 3 and Firefox 4+ just don't end up surviving because they lost the users who formerly made them great.
That's the problem with such open source software projects, they can continue as long as coders want to participate, they really don't actually need anyone to use the software. They are certainly demonstrating they don't care about users.
Yes having a cool app that applies effects to your photos now is content generation. Soon kids will just ask Siri or something like it to do it for them, and be perplexed by old geeks in retirement homes talking about what was really like to have admin privileges to a computing device with user serviceable parts inside.
Back in my day, you see, we spent hours doing that manually with filters in photoshop on powerful workstations, nowadays kids tap a few buttons and think they are 'creative'.
Oh.. and get off my lawn!