Don't get me wrong, I like the Android tablet and use it for a couple of hours a day on average. But it just seems to me that Linux distros have been very slow to get on the tablet scene. Until I can get Ubuntu / Fedora / SuSE on my tablet, I'll certainly settle for Android.
I have an Android phone and an Android tablet, both of which I like a lot, but with the tablet's 10" screen I do now find myself wanting a more power user desktop environment to use on it. I could make a list of features that I would like to see but I'd just end up describing a typical Linux distro with a decent desktop environment with some modifications tailored towards touch.
So what is the status of projects working towards this goal? I know KDE is working on Plasma Active and Canonical is obviously working towards making Unity as touch friendly as possible, so how far off are we from seeing tablet devices running a GNU/Linux distro with one of these desktop environments? Most GUI apps will require some work to be made touch friendly but that's never going to happen until a stable OS is readily available for them to run on.
Give me a proper taskbar, support for running KDE / QT / GTK / X applications, scripting and all the CLI stuff we take for granted on Linux along with a decent collection of apt-get style software repositories and I think I'd fall back in love with my tablet.
And before anyone replies with 'get a laptop!', I'm quite happy with my laptop thank you, but I also like the tablet form factor for many reasons and I'd just like to see some options for more 'traditional' computing brought to these devices.
On a full size physical keyboard I can easily get over 100 wpm with two fingers. Mind you, I've had years of practice after an accident left two of my fingers semi-crippled.
I'm sure I'm not the fastest at that either. This guy achieves 81 wpm on an iPhone, although doesn't look like he's using capitalisation or punctuation like I am.
Right, just did roughly the same test with two fingered pecking and much faster at 76 words per minute and only one typo (missed capitalisation at beginning of a sentence).:)
If I have a chance to get a helping hand to video it, I will do that if anyone is interested.
Ok, just recorded a very sketchy video, typing with one finger so I can hold the camera (not very well!) with my free hand. Typing pretty much what ever came into my head and then counted the words and typos and worked out typing rate from there. In the video, I have the tablet on a table but I think this is fairly representative of holding it with the other hand seeing as I'm balancing a camera anyway.
Words per minute: 41 Typos: 6 (couple spelling mistakes and 4 missed spaces)
I honestly don't normally make typos like that and if I didn't have to concentrate on holding a camera at the same time, I'm sure I could have done that typo free at ~50 words per minute. Maybe faster if I had planned what I was going to write.
If I was typing anything lengthy, I may put the tablet down on a surface and use two fingered pecking method. I think I'd be up to at least 60 words per minute then and with less typos. I'm sure there must be much faster tablet typers out there though!
I was going to upload the video to Youtube but it was pushing me to setup a Google+ account for that so I'm afraid I could not be bothered. You can play / download the MP4 from my Dropbox though.
Before anyone replies to this saying how crap 40/50 words per minute is compared to a physical keyboard typer, I am not disagreeing! I just wanted to point out that using a tablet for firing off emails, even IRC and document editing, is not much of a problem. You get used to typing on a tablet screen just as you had to get used to typing on your clunk-clunk Cherry.;)
Most of the people I know who have a tablet, use it primarily for media consumption and typing speed is not really of much importance. Having said that, I can tap out emails and the like at a reasonable rate - I'd estimate something like 50ish words per minute. That's using the replacement Android keyboard, Hackers Keyboard, which I thoroughly recommend for most power users (gives you a normal qwerty layout with shift, ctrl, etc., buttons where you'd expect them to be).
If you think we're on the tail end of any fad though, you're very mistaken. Touch screen devices are the future of computing for most people's needs. PCs will be for power users, developers, office use, hardcore gaming, etc, but for what 95% of consumers do, a tablet is a perfect fit.
Very clever stuff but I always found The Underhanded C Contest much more interesting. Sadly the last one of those was in 2009. I'd love to see that return.
They already do that. Bouncer scans all apps in the Google Play store for malicious software for known malware, spyware and trojans and also for behavior that may indicate an application is up to no good. It supposedly led to a 40% decrease in malware within the first few months of them running it.
I presume the scanner they are integrating within the Play store client app is aimed at doing the same but with the benefit of also checking apps downloaded from other markets and sources.
Yes, it's just an option. The monochrome theme is just one you can choose from and presumably the default as of this new version. You can choose a colour theme if you prefer, or make your own. Try the demo linked to in the summary, it uses a colour theme.
The focus of this story shouldn't be the new theme (it looks nice to me but not really a big deal) but the new functionality this version brings, mainly being the inline editing.
Textareas do have the advantage of being accessible too, to those using screen readers and the like.
Inline editing has lots of advantages too though, so maybe the perfect CMS way of doing things would be to have both options - inline editing for typical end users, and textarea (both plain and WYSIWYG replacements) for accessibility purposes.
It can be persisted in exactly the same way as a WYSIWYG textarea replacement within a tradiitonal CMS does it - using Javascript and AJAX to pass the content to your backend. Makes very little difference whether the data comes from a textarea or from another DOM element / Javscript variable.
Oh, and it could do a whole week between charges too. I know that's because it wasn't packing the same kind of horsepower, had a smaller screen and probably saw less intensive use, etc, but it is a feature I miss with today's smartphones.
I browsed the 'real' web on my old, trusty Nokia E61 well before the iPhone came about. Had a choice of browsers to choose from, including Opera, all of which had zoom controls from what I remember. It certainly wasn't as smooth as the touch experience we are spoilt with now but it was very usable. I used it for email on the move (IMAP synced), web, Google maps, games, office docs and for pretty much everything else I do with my modern smartphone, albeit slower and with a bit more 'clunkiness'.
If a telemarketer calls to try and sell me a service or product that I don't already have, then in it is generally a safe bet that I don't want or need it. If it happens to be for something that I would quite like, I am sure I can find a better price by myself rather than accept what a salesman is offering me over a phone line. I will never pay for something from a telemarketer and I detest the whole idea of sales people phoning strangers in an attempt to talk them into buying a product.
I'm not saying all telemarketers are bad, just that telemarketing as a whole is bad!
And it's not like you are surrendering all control of your data when you use Google Apps. Google Takeout allows you to download an archive of your docs and a quick search for Google Docs / Drive backup utilities turns up a lot of results too so it should be fairly simple to automate daily backups.
I only use Google Apps for email but have peace of mind that all my mail is synced locally (IMAP) to a server here and then frequently backed up from there. If I ever had any problems with Google's service (none so far in several years) then I can flick the switch on my domain's DNS and have email routed elsewhere very quickly.
Can't say I'd use Google Apps for anything other than email and calender so far though, it just doesn't appear slick enough for me to use professionally. I'm sure it will get better with time and it does have many upsides, but for now I am much happier using Libre Office on desktops, Samba file server for centralised storage and a VPN for external access. The main reasons I use Google Apps for email is because Google does it so damn well. Whatever problems I may suffer with my local network, I don't have to worry about customers not being able to reach me by email which would be a major source of stress for me. Plus, it's very slick on mobiles and works fine with Thunderbird via IMAP on my laptops.
The lower the orbit you put a spacecraft in around the moon, the more fuel you will need in order to continually correct for the moon's various mass concentrations (the moon is very lumpy). An orbiter just a few miles above the surface will need a LOT of fuel to keep it from crashing in to the moon's surface. A 1km orbit would be completely impracticable.
I've never tried noise cancelling headphones but I do have a pair of Samsung in-ear headphones that came with my tablet that are excellent for shutting out outside noise. They came with three different sizes of rubber boot so that you can make a perfect fit with your inner ear and even with no audio playing through them they are just as good as most ear plugs and are much more comfortable. For times when that doesn't quite cut it, like when trying to sleep beside a particularly loud snorer, I use an Android app called Lightning Bug to play a white noise / sea shore soundscape through them that I actually find rather soothing too.
I forgot to add, if people had donated $1,000,000 instead of their free time, then that would indeed give me a budget of $1,082,000. But that's not what people did so I have a $82,000 budget and the bonus that many of the resources I need are available for free, for whatever reason.
No, the budget is $82,000. They have a budget of $82,000 to spend on resources, regardless of the typical value of resources they are actually able to get their hands on.
If I wanted to produce a widget and set aside a budget of $82,000 to do a manufacturing run, that figure does not change if through various deals and favours I am able to get a factory to give me free, or very preferential rates, for whatever reason. Other widget manufacturers may still be paying the going rate of $1,000,000 to do the same but I don't work out the going rate for their factory time and add it to my budget, although I do understand I am getting $1,000,000 worth of resources for my $82,000.
In this context, budget simply means the planned amount of money to cover expenditure. If I can get people to do things for free, that's fantastic and I might end up with $1,000,000 worth of resources, but my budget was and will be $82,000.
I see where you're coming from but it doesn't change the fact that the budget is $82,000. Yes, plenty of people are donating time and resources and yes, not everyone can produce a similar film for that money, but regardless of how, they are producing this film on a $82,000 budget. That's very impressive.
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Don't get me wrong, I like the Android tablet and use it for a couple of hours a day on average. But it just seems to me that Linux distros have been very slow to get on the tablet scene. Until I can get Ubuntu / Fedora / SuSE on my tablet, I'll certainly settle for Android.
I have an Android phone and an Android tablet, both of which I like a lot, but with the tablet's 10" screen I do now find myself wanting a more power user desktop environment to use on it. I could make a list of features that I would like to see but I'd just end up describing a typical Linux distro with a decent desktop environment with some modifications tailored towards touch.
So what is the status of projects working towards this goal? I know KDE is working on Plasma Active and Canonical is obviously working towards making Unity as touch friendly as possible, so how far off are we from seeing tablet devices running a GNU/Linux distro with one of these desktop environments? Most GUI apps will require some work to be made touch friendly but that's never going to happen until a stable OS is readily available for them to run on.
Give me a proper taskbar, support for running KDE / QT / GTK / X applications, scripting and all the CLI stuff we take for granted on Linux along with a decent collection of apt-get style software repositories and I think I'd fall back in love with my tablet.
And before anyone replies with 'get a laptop!', I'm quite happy with my laptop thank you, but I also like the tablet form factor for many reasons and I'd just like to see some options for more 'traditional' computing brought to these devices.
Maybe you should ask a beluga whale?
Second test, two fingers, correcting typos as I go: 75.2 wpm. If my girlfriend wasn't giving me grief at having to film such a ridiculous dick-measuring experiment (her words, not mine), I'd beat that again. ;)
On a full size physical keyboard I can easily get over 100 wpm with two fingers. Mind you, I've had years of practice after an accident left two of my fingers semi-crippled.
I'm sure I'm not the fastest at that either. This guy achieves 81 wpm on an iPhone, although doesn't look like he's using capitalisation or punctuation like I am.
Right, just did roughly the same test with two fingered pecking and much faster at 76 words per minute and only one typo (missed capitalisation at beginning of a sentence). :)
If I have a chance to get a helping hand to video it, I will do that if anyone is interested.
Ok, just recorded a very sketchy video, typing with one finger so I can hold the camera (not very well!) with my free hand. Typing pretty much what ever came into my head and then counted the words and typos and worked out typing rate from there. In the video, I have the tablet on a table but I think this is fairly representative of holding it with the other hand seeing as I'm balancing a camera anyway.
Words per minute: 41
Typos: 6 (couple spelling mistakes and 4 missed spaces)
I honestly don't normally make typos like that and if I didn't have to concentrate on holding a camera at the same time, I'm sure I could have done that typo free at ~50 words per minute. Maybe faster if I had planned what I was going to write.
If I was typing anything lengthy, I may put the tablet down on a surface and use two fingered pecking method. I think I'd be up to at least 60 words per minute then and with less typos. I'm sure there must be much faster tablet typers out there though!
I was going to upload the video to Youtube but it was pushing me to setup a Google+ account for that so I'm afraid I could not be bothered. You can play / download the MP4 from my Dropbox though.
Before anyone replies to this saying how crap 40/50 words per minute is compared to a physical keyboard typer, I am not disagreeing! I just wanted to point out that using a tablet for firing off emails, even IRC and document editing, is not much of a problem. You get used to typing on a tablet screen just as you had to get used to typing on your clunk-clunk Cherry. ;)
Most of the people I know who have a tablet, use it primarily for media consumption and typing speed is not really of much importance. Having said that, I can tap out emails and the like at a reasonable rate - I'd estimate something like 50ish words per minute. That's using the replacement Android keyboard, Hackers Keyboard, which I thoroughly recommend for most power users (gives you a normal qwerty layout with shift, ctrl, etc., buttons where you'd expect them to be).
If you think we're on the tail end of any fad though, you're very mistaken. Touch screen devices are the future of computing for most people's needs. PCs will be for power users, developers, office use, hardcore gaming, etc, but for what 95% of consumers do, a tablet is a perfect fit.
Very clever stuff but I always found The Underhanded C Contest much more interesting. Sadly the last one of those was in 2009. I'd love to see that return.
They already do that. Bouncer scans all apps in the Google Play store for malicious software for known malware, spyware and trojans and also for behavior that may indicate an application is up to no good. It supposedly led to a 40% decrease in malware within the first few months of them running it.
I presume the scanner they are integrating within the Play store client app is aimed at doing the same but with the benefit of also checking apps downloaded from other markets and sources.
Yes, it's just an option. The monochrome theme is just one you can choose from and presumably the default as of this new version. You can choose a colour theme if you prefer, or make your own. Try the demo linked to in the summary, it uses a colour theme.
The focus of this story shouldn't be the new theme (it looks nice to me but not really a big deal) but the new functionality this version brings, mainly being the inline editing.
Textareas do have the advantage of being accessible too, to those using screen readers and the like.
Inline editing has lots of advantages too though, so maybe the perfect CMS way of doing things would be to have both options - inline editing for typical end users, and textarea (both plain and WYSIWYG replacements) for accessibility purposes.
It can be persisted in exactly the same way as a WYSIWYG textarea replacement within a tradiitonal CMS does it - using Javascript and AJAX to pass the content to your backend. Makes very little difference whether the data comes from a textarea or from another DOM element / Javscript variable.
Oh, and it could do a whole week between charges too. I know that's because it wasn't packing the same kind of horsepower, had a smaller screen and probably saw less intensive use, etc, but it is a feature I miss with today's smartphones.
I browsed the 'real' web on my old, trusty Nokia E61 well before the iPhone came about. Had a choice of browsers to choose from, including Opera, all of which had zoom controls from what I remember. It certainly wasn't as smooth as the touch experience we are spoilt with now but it was very usable. I used it for email on the move (IMAP synced), web, Google maps, games, office docs and for pretty much everything else I do with my modern smartphone, albeit slower and with a bit more 'clunkiness'.
I'm not sure if it started out as a Commodore 64 project but it has been ported to run on that system, along with a lot of other platforms.
If a telemarketer calls to try and sell me a service or product that I don't already have, then in it is generally a safe bet that I don't want or need it. If it happens to be for something that I would quite like, I am sure I can find a better price by myself rather than accept what a salesman is offering me over a phone line. I will never pay for something from a telemarketer and I detest the whole idea of sales people phoning strangers in an attempt to talk them into buying a product.
I'm not saying all telemarketers are bad, just that telemarketing as a whole is bad!
And it's not like you are surrendering all control of your data when you use Google Apps. Google Takeout allows you to download an archive of your docs and a quick search for Google Docs / Drive backup utilities turns up a lot of results too so it should be fairly simple to automate daily backups.
I only use Google Apps for email but have peace of mind that all my mail is synced locally (IMAP) to a server here and then frequently backed up from there. If I ever had any problems with Google's service (none so far in several years) then I can flick the switch on my domain's DNS and have email routed elsewhere very quickly.
Can't say I'd use Google Apps for anything other than email and calender so far though, it just doesn't appear slick enough for me to use professionally. I'm sure it will get better with time and it does have many upsides, but for now I am much happier using Libre Office on desktops, Samba file server for centralised storage and a VPN for external access. The main reasons I use Google Apps for email is because Google does it so damn well. Whatever problems I may suffer with my local network, I don't have to worry about customers not being able to reach me by email which would be a major source of stress for me. Plus, it's very slick on mobiles and works fine with Thunderbird via IMAP on my laptops.
The lower the orbit you put a spacecraft in around the moon, the more fuel you will need in order to continually correct for the moon's various mass concentrations (the moon is very lumpy). An orbiter just a few miles above the surface will need a LOT of fuel to keep it from crashing in to the moon's surface. A 1km orbit would be completely impracticable.
This NASA article explains the issue quite well.
I've never tried noise cancelling headphones but I do have a pair of Samsung in-ear headphones that came with my tablet that are excellent for shutting out outside noise. They came with three different sizes of rubber boot so that you can make a perfect fit with your inner ear and even with no audio playing through them they are just as good as most ear plugs and are much more comfortable. For times when that doesn't quite cut it, like when trying to sleep beside a particularly loud snorer, I use an Android app called Lightning Bug to play a white noise / sea shore soundscape through them that I actually find rather soothing too.
Yep, Slashdot, SourceForge and Freecode for $20,000,000.
I agree that we're largely arguing about semantics.
And regardless of budget, it looks like it could be a really good film. :)
I forgot to add, if people had donated $1,000,000 instead of their free time, then that would indeed give me a budget of $1,082,000. But that's not what people did so I have a $82,000 budget and the bonus that many of the resources I need are available for free, for whatever reason.
No, the budget is $82,000. They have a budget of $82,000 to spend on resources, regardless of the typical value of resources they are actually able to get their hands on.
If I wanted to produce a widget and set aside a budget of $82,000 to do a manufacturing run, that figure does not change if through various deals and favours I am able to get a factory to give me free, or very preferential rates, for whatever reason. Other widget manufacturers may still be paying the going rate of $1,000,000 to do the same but I don't work out the going rate for their factory time and add it to my budget, although I do understand I am getting $1,000,000 worth of resources for my $82,000.
In this context, budget simply means the planned amount of money to cover expenditure. If I can get people to do things for free, that's fantastic and I might end up with $1,000,000 worth of resources, but my budget was and will be $82,000.
I see where you're coming from but it doesn't change the fact that the budget is $82,000. Yes, plenty of people are donating time and resources and yes, not everyone can produce a similar film for that money, but regardless of how, they are producing this film on a $82,000 budget. That's very impressive.
Nothing made public on there yet but presumably this is where it will be:-
GarageGames GitHub Respositories