That was just the Google web frontend. Their Javascript toolkit sucked. But it was already usable, and in a year, with faster machines and better JS engines, nobody would have even noticed anymore.
In addition, people were building other front-ends; micro-wave.appspot.com was much faster and simpler, and the first desktop clients started appearing.
But is there a reason why the Archos 5 is stuck on 1.6
It's a heavily customized device, so updating to 2.1 takes a while. Many Android phones are also still at 1.6. I have a 1.6 phone and it's fine; even Android 1.6 has multitasking and is already at least as powerful as iOS 4.
and has no official Android Market support?
Because it doesn't meet the Google's hardware requirements. And iPod-like devices just aren't a high priority for Google, probably because they don't matter much in most of the world.
The Galaxy S is a high-end device with GPS, a high resolution screen, top of the line radio, and tons of other features; you're getting far more than an iPod, and you're paying a premium for a top-of-the-line device.
There are several $200 Android phones (e.g., the Xperia X8), you just can't easily get them in the US due to the mobile carrier mess in the US. Outside the US, non-phone music players also make less and less sense since the phone portion is so cheap and extra SIMs are so easy to get.
The reason the iPod is still there is because Apple is a US company and in the US this makes sense. For companies with worldwide distribution, non-phone music players are getting less and less important.
For 20 years, we have been stuck with a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems, because of marketing and network effects. We don't want to repeat that experience, blindly sliding into an iOS monopoly for portable devices.
Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing their devices every year, often lying and misrepresenting their products and their history. It is reasonable for geeks to present an opposing view so that buyers can make an informed decision, know what they are getting, and understand the consequences of their purchases.
Put your money where your mouth is by shutting up and buying something is.
Why then doesn't Apple "shut up" and stop marketing their products? Why do you think that all the information we should ever get about products should come from the PR and marketing departments of companies selling those products?
I have considered that. But do you know of an Android smartphone or PDA with a sticker price anywhere near the $200 sticker price of an iPod touch?
Part of that problem is the US mobile market; in Europe, you can get several Android phones for around $200 (e.g., the Xperia X8, very much an iPod-like device, or the Xperia X10, a really tiny phone/media player), and the price difference for an Android device with and without phone parts wouldn't be worth the extra cost of making two devices. But, then, in Europe, getting an extra SIM card is so cheap and simple that people just stick one into every device they carry--why not?
In the US, you can get an Archos 5 or Archos 7 for around $200; they are media players running Android.
Unlike the iPhone/iPad, which makes you go through several menus to get to the place where you can enable the VPN connection. But then it silently disconnects some time later and you accidentally browse over your open regular ISP connection.
Sorry, but VPN on iOS is totally and dangerously broken.
Google Wave was a collaboration tool, and that made it nearly useless during its limited preview. It was available generally for less than three months before Google killed it. That would be a ridiculously short time for any new service, let alone for one that actually requires network effects to become useful.
I don't know whether Google Wave would have replaced E-mail or chat; it had the potential to do that, but that was far off. But it was an excellent collaboration tool. It could have been Google's replacement for Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and systems like that, and it looked like it was on track for that. Incremental changes to GMail are not going to cut it.
With killing Wave, Google killed something that could have become quite important for them in the future. And they also killed the good will and trust of a lot of developers and users.
Google should have given Wave three years, not three months, of general availability.
It's easy to accumulate 2TB in video data, say on iTunes. And it's reasonable to want to transfer that from one machine to another over the Internet (e.g., to back it up to a machine somewhere else or in the cloud).
If ISPs don't want this to happen, they need clear limits and rules, not underhanded complaints and name calling.
German data privacy rules for the state is based on the principle to avoid unnecessary data collection.
Much of the data that the German government collects isn't "necessary", since most other governments work just fine without it.
Privacy and data protection in Germany are a joke, and all the hysteria surrounding Google Street View is really just political posturing. First, it lets the German government divert attention from its atrocious record on privacy and civil rights, and second it is whipped up by publishers who have an ax to grind with Google.
Third, we are far away from totalitarianism
Are you having trouble understanding the meaning of "rapidly heading towards"? Furthermore, if you check your history, the transition from democracy to totalitarianism is often quick and unexpected; a steady erosion of civil rights and liberties lays the groundwork.
Second, there are states like the UK where they use video cameras at large while in Germany the use is still restricted to a view areas.
Restricted to what??? Government-operated cameras are all over Germany: in cities, on highways, on roads.
What do you understand by the term anarchy?
I didn't use the term, why do you bring it up? Do you think that allowing public photography amounts to "anarchy"? Get real.
Protecting freedom of the press and keeping public spaces public is not anarchy, it's the bedrock of democracy. Giving individuals full control over their personal data, on the other hand, is anti-democratic; democracy cannot function if people can keep secret arbitrary information.
What's there to "spin"? The Nazis and the USSR proved conclusively that mass murdering, totalitarian regimes can produce big science quickly, possibly more quickly than democracies. Being first on big science isn't necessarily something to brag about.
That depends on what you call a "cure". You probably carry hundreds of nearly dormant viruses around that your body can never get rid of. Yet, you wouldn't consider yourself "ill".
If they can introduce TRIM5a into human cells and get it expressed, people would end up not needing drugs, not being infectious, and not having any symptoms. That's about as "cured" as you are of many other viral diseases.
Ahem... that one _is_ one of God's laws: "Thou shalt not steal". Written in stone, no less.
Actually, the correct translation is "Thou shalt not kidnap", as the "stealing" in the original referred to the "stealing" of people.
(Of course, even that's a translation from a bunch of cobbled-together sources, interpreted and edited multiple times by people with different axes to grind.)
Yes, you can make that argument that the GPL never allows redistribution because you can never be sure that something is patent-unencumbered.
However, intent matters. The intent of the GPL is pretty clearly that you can redistribute unless there are clear and known reasons against it. As far as Java is concerned, there are now.
Germany is a democracy. People voted for their government and this once that government sets their people before a company (They also do more things that the people do NOT like, but those are separate issues)
What does that have to do with the issue? What Best is doing is still entirely legal. It does force the issue, however: is Germany going to just do away with press and photographic freedom altogether, or is it going to stop these absurd restrictions?
These people asked to be removed from that specific database for whatever reason. People want to have much more privacy and their elected government is wanting to give that to them.
The people of Germany also elected a government that threw Jews into ghettos and then murdered them; that doesn't make it right. And the people of California voted to outlaw gay marriage and have just been told that doing so probably runs afoul of the constitution. Not everything people vote for in a democracy is right or legal.
Democracy is meaningless if citizens don't have meaningful data based on which to make decisions. Being able to see, on the ground and without bias, how other people live is an important part of that. Neither your embarrassment at having an ostentatiously big house, nor your embarrassment at living in a slum, should allow you to restrict other people from seeing that.
So the people do not WANT the pictures to be taken. They WANT to limit the freedom of the press. Both by law AND by own choice. I am one of those people who do believe in privacy more then in _absolute_ freedom of the press.
And that belief is probably why Germany keeps slipping into totalitarianism. When will you people wake up?
And Germany doesn't have much privacy where it counts: the German government is one of the most intrusive governments in the West, tracking its citizens in minute detail from cradle to death.
As Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
How the fuck is is standing up for democracy to ignore peoples wishes and publish pictures of them and their homes on the internet? That's the polar opposite.
Your wishes aren't relevant as far as public streets are concerned. I have a right to be there, I have a right to photograph there, and those rights are worth protecting. Democracy is meaningless if voters don't have information to base their decisions on.
That means for local elections, that I should be able to see, document, and share how my taxes are distributed across neighborhoods and what the effects of zoning laws are.
It also means that low-income people should be able to see the neighborhoods that the rich live in, and vice versa.
Google Street View makes that easy, and that's a good thing. Whether you like it doesn't matter.
And what does that have to do with anything anyway? A camera may get police angry at you, but by itself, it isn't cause for them to draw their guns. If you draw a gun, however, police will draw theirs.
I'm sorry, as I was saying: Eric Scott is not a symbol for dangers to photographers. If you want to see what kinds of dangers photographers face, go to PINAC.
He points out that there are comparatively few genes. That's nice. Any undergraduate in biology knows this argument and it's been around for decades.
Kurzweil seems to have made a career out of taking other people's ideas, stating the obvious, and getting his name associated with it. People should really stop listening to him.
"Covering forks" really isn't very meaningful. What that means is that you can't redistribute the software under the GPL at all since you can't meet the terms of the GPL. As a result, the GPL on OpenJDK (or any other patent-covered software) is really a sham.
Really, it isn't illegal and that isn't why Google removes them
Germany is trying to make it illegal.
My address, phone number, and a great deal of other information is certainly public knowledge - one can look it up on the internet (and I even use an abbreviated version of my real name so it isn't even that hard), yet I still wouldn't want all that attached to every post I made.
How is that relevant? Google Streetview doesn't prevent you from being anonymous, nor does it identify you in any way. It gives people access to pictures of public places.
If he wants to push a real cause go take photographs of military installations or secure places like nuclear power plants.
Generally, photographing those is also legal. When there are restrictions, they are legal, too.
His cause is to ensure that what is currently legal remains legal, so that (among other things) bloggers and an independent press can continue to take photographs and publish them.
That analogy doesn't work. Eric Scott had a gun. Doing anything with a gun while police are around is dangerous. A camera is not a gun. It doesn't threaten the life of police, and it probably won't get you killed, no matter what.
German politicians seem to think that the best thing to do is to give each person total control over data about them... total control, except, of course where the German state is concerned. The German state collects and shares data about its citizens in a way that would be unacceptable in most other democratic nations. Germany is rapidly heading towards totalitarianism again.
Slashdot Mirror
That was just the Google web frontend. Their Javascript toolkit sucked. But it was already usable, and in a year, with faster machines and better JS engines, nobody would have even noticed anymore.
In addition, people were building other front-ends; micro-wave.appspot.com was much faster and simpler, and the first desktop clients started appearing.
But is there a reason why the Archos 5 is stuck on 1.6
It's a heavily customized device, so updating to 2.1 takes a while. Many Android phones are also still at 1.6. I have a 1.6 phone and it's fine; even Android 1.6 has multitasking and is already at least as powerful as iOS 4.
and has no official Android Market support?
Because it doesn't meet the Google's hardware requirements. And iPod-like devices just aren't a high priority for Google, probably because they don't matter much in most of the world.
Both the second and third generation iPod touch can run iOS 4, unlike the Galaxy I7500
So? Android 1.6 is already more capable than iOS 4, including support for multitasking and multiple screen sizes.
If you want the equivalent of an iOS 4 device in terms of functionality, any Android device will do, it doesn't have to be a 2.x device.
The Galaxy S is a high-end device with GPS, a high resolution screen, top of the line radio, and tons of other features; you're getting far more than an iPod, and you're paying a premium for a top-of-the-line device.
There are several $200 Android phones (e.g., the Xperia X8), you just can't easily get them in the US due to the mobile carrier mess in the US. Outside the US, non-phone music players also make less and less sense since the phone portion is so cheap and extra SIMs are so easy to get.
The reason the iPod is still there is because Apple is a US company and in the US this makes sense. For companies with worldwide distribution, non-phone music players are getting less and less important.
There are, and always will be*, alternatives
For 20 years, we have been stuck with a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems, because of marketing and network effects. We don't want to repeat that experience, blindly sliding into an iOS monopoly for portable devices.
Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing their devices every year, often lying and misrepresenting their products and their history. It is reasonable for geeks to present an opposing view so that buyers can make an informed decision, know what they are getting, and understand the consequences of their purchases.
Put your money where your mouth is by shutting up and buying something is.
Why then doesn't Apple "shut up" and stop marketing their products? Why do you think that all the information we should ever get about products should come from the PR and marketing departments of companies selling those products?
I have considered that. But do you know of an Android smartphone or PDA with a sticker price anywhere near the $200 sticker price of an iPod touch?
Part of that problem is the US mobile market; in Europe, you can get several Android phones for around $200 (e.g., the Xperia X8, very much an iPod-like device, or the Xperia X10, a really tiny phone/media player), and the price difference for an Android device with and without phone parts wouldn't be worth the extra cost of making two devices. But, then, in Europe, getting an extra SIM card is so cheap and simple that people just stick one into every device they carry--why not?
In the US, you can get an Archos 5 or Archos 7 for around $200; they are media players running Android.
Unlike the iPhone/iPad, which makes you go through several menus to get to the place where you can enable the VPN connection. But then it silently disconnects some time later and you accidentally browse over your open regular ISP connection.
Sorry, but VPN on iOS is totally and dangerously broken.
Google Wave was a collaboration tool, and that made it nearly useless during its limited preview. It was available generally for less than three months before Google killed it. That would be a ridiculously short time for any new service, let alone for one that actually requires network effects to become useful.
I don't know whether Google Wave would have replaced E-mail or chat; it had the potential to do that, but that was far off. But it was an excellent collaboration tool. It could have been Google's replacement for Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and systems like that, and it looked like it was on track for that. Incremental changes to GMail are not going to cut it.
With killing Wave, Google killed something that could have become quite important for them in the future. And they also killed the good will and trust of a lot of developers and users.
Google should have given Wave three years, not three months, of general availability.
No, because the limit there would be upload rates, which are much less.
It's easy to accumulate 2TB in video data, say on iTunes. And it's reasonable to want to transfer that from one machine to another over the Internet (e.g., to back it up to a machine somewhere else or in the cloud).
If ISPs don't want this to happen, they need clear limits and rules, not underhanded complaints and name calling.
German data privacy rules for the state is based on the principle to avoid unnecessary data collection.
Much of the data that the German government collects isn't "necessary", since most other governments work just fine without it.
Privacy and data protection in Germany are a joke, and all the hysteria surrounding Google Street View is really just political posturing. First, it lets the German government divert attention from its atrocious record on privacy and civil rights, and second it is whipped up by publishers who have an ax to grind with Google.
Third, we are far away from totalitarianism
Are you having trouble understanding the meaning of "rapidly heading towards"? Furthermore, if you check your history, the transition from democracy to totalitarianism is often quick and unexpected; a steady erosion of civil rights and liberties lays the groundwork.
Second, there are states like the UK where they use video cameras at large while in Germany the use is still restricted to a view areas.
Restricted to what??? Government-operated cameras are all over Germany: in cities, on highways, on roads.
What do you understand by the term anarchy?
I didn't use the term, why do you bring it up? Do you think that allowing public photography amounts to "anarchy"? Get real.
Protecting freedom of the press and keeping public spaces public is not anarchy, it's the bedrock of democracy. Giving individuals full control over their personal data, on the other hand, is anti-democratic; democracy cannot function if people can keep secret arbitrary information.
What's there to "spin"? The Nazis and the USSR proved conclusively that mass murdering, totalitarian regimes can produce big science quickly, possibly more quickly than democracies. Being first on big science isn't necessarily something to brag about.
That depends on what you call a "cure". You probably carry hundreds of nearly dormant viruses around that your body can never get rid of. Yet, you wouldn't consider yourself "ill".
If they can introduce TRIM5a into human cells and get it expressed, people would end up not needing drugs, not being infectious, and not having any symptoms. That's about as "cured" as you are of many other viral diseases.
Ahem... that one _is_ one of God's laws: "Thou shalt not steal". Written in stone, no less.
Actually, the correct translation is "Thou shalt not kidnap", as the "stealing" in the original referred to the "stealing" of people.
(Of course, even that's a translation from a bunch of cobbled-together sources, interpreted and edited multiple times by people with different axes to grind.)
Yes, you can make that argument that the GPL never allows redistribution because you can never be sure that something is patent-unencumbered.
However, intent matters. The intent of the GPL is pretty clearly that you can redistribute unless there are clear and known reasons against it. As far as Java is concerned, there are now.
Germany is a democracy. People voted for their government and this once that government sets their people before a company (They also do more things that the people do NOT like, but those are separate issues)
What does that have to do with the issue? What Best is doing is still entirely legal. It does force the issue, however: is Germany going to just do away with press and photographic freedom altogether, or is it going to stop these absurd restrictions?
These people asked to be removed from that specific database for whatever reason. People want to have much more privacy and their elected government is wanting to give that to them.
The people of Germany also elected a government that threw Jews into ghettos and then murdered them; that doesn't make it right. And the people of California voted to outlaw gay marriage and have just been told that doing so probably runs afoul of the constitution. Not everything people vote for in a democracy is right or legal.
Democracy is meaningless if citizens don't have meaningful data based on which to make decisions. Being able to see, on the ground and without bias, how other people live is an important part of that. Neither your embarrassment at having an ostentatiously big house, nor your embarrassment at living in a slum, should allow you to restrict other people from seeing that.
So the people do not WANT the pictures to be taken. They WANT to limit the freedom of the press. Both by law AND by own choice. I am one of those people who do believe in privacy more then in _absolute_ freedom of the press.
And that belief is probably why Germany keeps slipping into totalitarianism. When will you people wake up?
And Germany doesn't have much privacy where it counts: the German government is one of the most intrusive governments in the West, tracking its citizens in minute detail from cradle to death.
As Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
How the fuck is is standing up for democracy to ignore peoples wishes and publish pictures of them and their homes on the internet? That's the polar opposite.
Your wishes aren't relevant as far as public streets are concerned. I have a right to be there, I have a right to photograph there, and those rights are worth protecting. Democracy is meaningless if voters don't have information to base their decisions on.
That means for local elections, that I should be able to see, document, and share how my taxes are distributed across neighborhoods and what the effects of zoning laws are.
It also means that low-income people should be able to see the neighborhoods that the rich live in, and vice versa.
Google Street View makes that easy, and that's a good thing. Whether you like it doesn't matter.
That photographer was killed by a tank shell.
And what does that have to do with anything anyway? A camera may get police angry at you, but by itself, it isn't cause for them to draw their guns. If you draw a gun, however, police will draw theirs.
I'm sorry, as I was saying: Eric Scott is not a symbol for dangers to photographers. If you want to see what kinds of dangers photographers face, go to PINAC.
Why not?
He points out that there are comparatively few genes. That's nice. Any undergraduate in biology knows this argument and it's been around for decades.
Kurzweil seems to have made a career out of taking other people's ideas, stating the obvious, and getting his name associated with it. People should really stop listening to him.
"Covering forks" really isn't very meaningful. What that means is that you can't redistribute the software under the GPL at all since you can't meet the terms of the GPL. As a result, the GPL on OpenJDK (or any other patent-covered software) is really a sham.
Really, it isn't illegal and that isn't why Google removes them
Germany is trying to make it illegal.
My address, phone number, and a great deal of other information is certainly public knowledge - one can look it up on the internet (and I even use an abbreviated version of my real name so it isn't even that hard), yet I still wouldn't want all that attached to every post I made.
How is that relevant? Google Streetview doesn't prevent you from being anonymous, nor does it identify you in any way. It gives people access to pictures of public places.
If he wants to push a real cause go take photographs of military installations or secure places like nuclear power plants.
Generally, photographing those is also legal. When there are restrictions, they are legal, too.
His cause is to ensure that what is currently legal remains legal, so that (among other things) bloggers and an independent press can continue to take photographs and publish them.
but who can say no to someone's right to keep the front gardens off of a publicly accessible mapping system.
You have that right. The means you use to do that is called a "fence".
Of course, Germany restricts tall fences in many places because they are considered ugly.
(to the rest of us, we know this guys just being an arsehole)
If standing up for democracy and freedom of speech makes someone an "arsehole", we need more people like that.
That analogy doesn't work. Eric Scott had a gun. Doing anything with a gun while police are around is dangerous. A camera is not a gun. It doesn't threaten the life of police, and it probably won't get you killed, no matter what.
German politicians seem to think that the best thing to do is to give each person total control over data about them... total control, except, of course where the German state is concerned. The German state collects and shares data about its citizens in a way that would be unacceptable in most other democratic nations. Germany is rapidly heading towards totalitarianism again.