It runs Maemo/Meego, which is based on Debian, and can therefore run lots of standard Linux programs. It's also fully open and not locked down at all, unlike iOS/Android. The things that it can do that other phones can't do are very niche hacker things though, hence the popularity on Slashdot. I do have one, and it's fun to play around with, and certainly better than anything else for using a terminal and SSHing into servers, but for anything else I much prefer Android, since it's much easier to use and has apps that are better designed for touchscreens.
You're thinking of VP8, the codec. V8 is the name of Chrome's JavaScript engine, which is generally considered to be the fastest JS engine of any browser.
There's also a third one I seriously considered, but I can't remember it's name at the moment. It uses the icon of a mouse to signify the menu.
Sounds like you're talking about XFCE. It's quite similar to Gnome 2, simple and usable, but is indeed lacking some features and polish.
You might want to look into Cinnamon too. It's a fork of Gnome 3 developed by Mint, but is available on various other distros now. It uses the underlying code of Gnome 3 but has an interface similar to Gnome 2. I haven't tried it myself, but it has been getting good reviews.
Those links are all over 2 years old, so don't really prove anything about the performance of Opera now. Especially considering how much webkit has developed in that time, and the shift in focus towards JS performance. The second link even says to stop posting it on Slashdot because it's so outdated.
Actually, it does seem to update itself on Ubuntu, outside of the package manager. Mine updated overnight on my work computer, but I have no root/sudo access to install programs normally. Not entirely sure how it does that.
Or they could just use one of the many commercial products available that do this sort of filtering for you. But no, of course we need the government to do it for everyone.
Mercury, and essentially every browser on iOS, is just a different UI on top of Safari. Obviously this allows for extra features, but limits how much can be done with them. Apple enforces this rule, and doesn't allow browsers which use a different rendering engine. Android doesn't have this limitation, which allows for a much larger variety of browsers, and much bigger gaps in performance. The same site did a similar test with iOS browsers, and the performance results were very similar, which isn't exactly surprising since they all use the same back end.
While some of the results are interesting, I don't think this is a particularly good comparison. For a lot of the tests they said "This doesn't work on this browser, so we didn't include that test". Surely that should be a win for the browsers that DO support it, rather than just ignoring that feature. Personally, I'd care more that a browser can render more things, rather than if it can render some things a few seconds faster, but fail at others.
Not to mention, it completely ignores things like features, reliability, usability, security, etc, which are very varied between the different browsers. That's what I base my choice on anyway, and many that I've tried either crash, fail to load some pages, render pages incorrectly, or lack important features. Personally I find Firefox works best for me, but results would probably vary with different phones/OS versions, and some features are more important than others for different people
The Intel Atom CPUs actually have pretty low power usage compared to ARM. The Intel powered RAZR i has better battery life than the ARM powered RAZR M (identical hardware besides the SoC). The performance of the Intels isn't quite as good in mobiles, but that's partly down to optimisation.
Android has been ported to x86, a lot of the code was contributed by Intel themselves. There's only one or two x86 based Android phones out so far though, so you're right that it is primarily an ARM market.
It's not available on the Play store in JB, or installed by default, but you can still install the APK manually, and it still works in browsers that support it. (Firefox, Opera, Dolphin. Not sure if the stock browser still does on JB)
Besides, if people cared about Flash that much then the iPhone/iPad wouln't be so popular. It's nice having the option of Flash on my phone, but I didn't even realise until last week that I didn't have it installed, after having my current phone for 3 months. It's rare that I have a need for it on my phone.
Well, yes and no. You can't just take the code they've released and put it on your phone, since that lacks a lot of the hardware drivers and such that are needed to make it compatible with each phone. It's possible for developers to get it to work on most phones, but it takes some time. At the moment, pretty much the only phones which you can put a fully functioning Jelly Bean ROM are the Nexus phones. A lot other recent phones have already got people working on JB ROMs, and many of them have beta versions already, but most of them have problems with various things (eg camera, wifi, audio not working). Chances are they'll get it working before the manufacturers actually release updates.
Once there is a ROM available though, the process of installing it is pretty simple for most devices. Anything that could run ICS should be able to run JB, assuming people are able to port it.
I think they're just referencing the Kindle Fire, which is very Amazon centric and cuts out a lot of the functionality of Android. It's pretty much designed to use Amazon content and nothing else. It's easy to assume that any phone the produced would be similar.
Unfortunately the Linux 'port' of Limbo is actually just a Wine wrapper. It doesn't even run for me, some say it works worse than running the Windows binary in Wine, or have reported various problems and bad performance.
Pretty lazy when every other game has managed to make a proper native Linux port.
So are MS just complaining about a problem which was already fixed before Chrome topped IE in their rankings? That's how it sounds at least.
From StatCounter's FAQ, and also noted on all of their graphs for this time period:
"Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats."
It's Webkit based, and that's about where the similarities end (so is Safari and a lot of minor browsers). You could say the same about Chrome for Android too really, there's nothing particularly "Chrome" about it besides the branding. Not sure what sync feature you're referring to, but I think it's probably more of a Google account thing rather than a Chrome browser thing, there were definitely things like that before Chrome was released for Android.
The User Agent doesn't specify it as Chrome anyway, and I believe that they count mobile browsers seperately. Even if it is included, Android browsing only accounts for about 2% of the total (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_.28July_2008_to_present.29), so it's not really significant enough to sway things.
It always amuses me a bit when I come across posts on StackOverflow or other tech forums where one of the answers is "Google for it" - which I found by googling it. The world needs people to ask the simple questions first so that people can google their answers later!
Sort of. The actual version number of java is still 1.6, 1.7, etc, but it's always referred to (by Oracle officially and by people generally) as Java 6, Java 7, etc. I'm not entirely sure when they did that, but the guy sat at the desk next to me has a "Java 2" book. I guess they got to 1.2 and wanted to make it sound big, but didn't want to change the version number?
Who knows what they'll do when they hit version 2.0.
That's really anything to do with the file system anyway. Recycle Bin isn't a feature of NTFS/FAT, it's a feature of Windows, and there's plenty of things available in Linux that do the same thing for EXT3/4 and I assume work fine for any natively supported FS. It's not like it's magically "undeleting" files, it just moves them to some other location, which the OS may choose to handle differently to normal directories.
Even after you remove it from there, the data's still on the disk, until that part of the disk gets written over. I guess you could have some sort of filesystem level backup of deleted files, but it's still just a lower level abstraction of "moving the file somewhere you can't see it" rather than "removing" it.
In the end, if you're deleting files because you're need the disk space for something else, you're probably going to want to write over those bits at some point. I can't see much benefit of a filesystem level version of 'undelete' besides working across OSs, and that'd actually require the OSs to support it. I guess it'd be a 'catch all' for different desktop environments/UIs/command lines.
This seems likely. I remember when HP bought out Palm, they were talking about using WebOS in printers, and having integration between phones/tablets/printers/every device running WebOS. This made some amount of sense when there were devices to integrate with, but now they're basically giving up on WebOS in mobile devices, there's not much point.
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It runs Maemo/Meego, which is based on Debian, and can therefore run lots of standard Linux programs. It's also fully open and not locked down at all, unlike iOS/Android. The things that it can do that other phones can't do are very niche hacker things though, hence the popularity on Slashdot. I do have one, and it's fun to play around with, and certainly better than anything else for using a terminal and SSHing into servers, but for anything else I much prefer Android, since it's much easier to use and has apps that are better designed for touchscreens.
You're thinking of VP8, the codec. V8 is the name of Chrome's JavaScript engine, which is generally considered to be the fastest JS engine of any browser.
There's also a third one I seriously considered, but I can't remember it's name at the moment. It uses the icon of a mouse to signify the menu.
Sounds like you're talking about XFCE. It's quite similar to Gnome 2, simple and usable, but is indeed lacking some features and polish.
You might want to look into Cinnamon too. It's a fork of Gnome 3 developed by Mint, but is available on various other distros now. It uses the underlying code of Gnome 3 but has an interface similar to Gnome 2. I haven't tried it myself, but it has been getting good reviews.
Those links are all over 2 years old, so don't really prove anything about the performance of Opera now. Especially considering how much webkit has developed in that time, and the shift in focus towards JS performance. The second link even says to stop posting it on Slashdot because it's so outdated.
Actually, it does seem to update itself on Ubuntu, outside of the package manager. Mine updated overnight on my work computer, but I have no root/sudo access to install programs normally. Not entirely sure how it does that.
Or they could just use one of the many commercial products available that do this sort of filtering for you. But no, of course we need the government to do it for everyone.
Mercury, and essentially every browser on iOS, is just a different UI on top of Safari. Obviously this allows for extra features, but limits how much can be done with them. Apple enforces this rule, and doesn't allow browsers which use a different rendering engine. Android doesn't have this limitation, which allows for a much larger variety of browsers, and much bigger gaps in performance. The same site did a similar test with iOS browsers, and the performance results were very similar, which isn't exactly surprising since they all use the same back end.
While some of the results are interesting, I don't think this is a particularly good comparison. For a lot of the tests they said "This doesn't work on this browser, so we didn't include that test". Surely that should be a win for the browsers that DO support it, rather than just ignoring that feature. Personally, I'd care more that a browser can render more things, rather than if it can render some things a few seconds faster, but fail at others.
Not to mention, it completely ignores things like features, reliability, usability, security, etc, which are very varied between the different browsers. That's what I base my choice on anyway, and many that I've tried either crash, fail to load some pages, render pages incorrectly, or lack important features. Personally I find Firefox works best for me, but results would probably vary with different phones/OS versions, and some features are more important than others for different people
But hey, everyone loves benchmark numbers
The Intel Atom CPUs actually have pretty low power usage compared to ARM. The Intel powered RAZR i has better battery life than the ARM powered RAZR M (identical hardware besides the SoC). The performance of the Intels isn't quite as good in mobiles, but that's partly down to optimisation.
Android has been ported to x86, a lot of the code was contributed by Intel themselves. There's only one or two x86 based Android phones out so far though, so you're right that it is primarily an ARM market.
They've said that they don't plan for Xen to just be an "epilogue", it sounds like they want to make the rest of the game as long as the part they've released so far. Not sure what they have planned. (Source: http://www.vg247.com/2012/09/03/black-mesa-xen-sections-will-be-their-own-expanded-game-says-dev/ )
It's not available on the Play store in JB, or installed by default, but you can still install the APK manually, and it still works in browsers that support it. (Firefox, Opera, Dolphin. Not sure if the stock browser still does on JB)
Besides, if people cared about Flash that much then the iPhone/iPad wouln't be so popular. It's nice having the option of Flash on my phone, but I didn't even realise until last week that I didn't have it installed, after having my current phone for 3 months. It's rare that I have a need for it on my phone.
Well, yes and no. You can't just take the code they've released and put it on your phone, since that lacks a lot of the hardware drivers and such that are needed to make it compatible with each phone. It's possible for developers to get it to work on most phones, but it takes some time. At the moment, pretty much the only phones which you can put a fully functioning Jelly Bean ROM are the Nexus phones. A lot other recent phones have already got people working on JB ROMs, and many of them have beta versions already, but most of them have problems with various things (eg camera, wifi, audio not working). Chances are they'll get it working before the manufacturers actually release updates.
Once there is a ROM available though, the process of installing it is pretty simple for most devices. Anything that could run ICS should be able to run JB, assuming people are able to port it.
I think they're just referencing the Kindle Fire, which is very Amazon centric and cuts out a lot of the functionality of Android. It's pretty much designed to use Amazon content and nothing else. It's easy to assume that any phone the produced would be similar.
Amnesia is the only one I've played, which is very good. Bastion and Limbo are also very highly rated. Don't know anything about the one.
Unfortunately the Linux 'port' of Limbo is actually just a Wine wrapper. It doesn't even run for me, some say it works worse than running the Windows binary in Wine, or have reported various problems and bad performance.
Pretty lazy when every other game has managed to make a proper native Linux port.
So are MS just complaining about a problem which was already fixed before Chrome topped IE in their rankings? That's how it sounds at least.
From StatCounter's FAQ, and also noted on all of their graphs for this time period:
"Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats."
http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#prerendering
It's Webkit based, and that's about where the similarities end (so is Safari and a lot of minor browsers). You could say the same about Chrome for Android too really, there's nothing particularly "Chrome" about it besides the branding. Not sure what sync feature you're referring to, but I think it's probably more of a Google account thing rather than a Chrome browser thing, there were definitely things like that before Chrome was released for Android.
The User Agent doesn't specify it as Chrome anyway, and I believe that they count mobile browsers seperately. Even if it is included, Android browsing only accounts for about 2% of the total (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_.28July_2008_to_present.29), so it's not really significant enough to sway things.
The question is, does anyone have a paid copy of it? Maybe if you removed your DRM, you'd have more paying customers!
It always amuses me a bit when I come across posts on StackOverflow or other tech forums where one of the answers is "Google for it" - which I found by googling it. The world needs people to ask the simple questions first so that people can google their answers later!
And the answer will almost certainly be yes.
I once got shouted at for saying Birmingham was in the north (by a Birmingham resident).
Sort of. The actual version number of java is still 1.6, 1.7, etc, but it's always referred to (by Oracle officially and by people generally) as Java 6, Java 7, etc. I'm not entirely sure when they did that, but the guy sat at the desk next to me has a "Java 2" book. I guess they got to 1.2 and wanted to make it sound big, but didn't want to change the version number?
Who knows what they'll do when they hit version 2.0.
That's really anything to do with the file system anyway. Recycle Bin isn't a feature of NTFS/FAT, it's a feature of Windows, and there's plenty of things available in Linux that do the same thing for EXT3/4 and I assume work fine for any natively supported FS. It's not like it's magically "undeleting" files, it just moves them to some other location, which the OS may choose to handle differently to normal directories.
Even after you remove it from there, the data's still on the disk, until that part of the disk gets written over. I guess you could have some sort of filesystem level backup of deleted files, but it's still just a lower level abstraction of "moving the file somewhere you can't see it" rather than "removing" it.
In the end, if you're deleting files because you're need the disk space for something else, you're probably going to want to write over those bits at some point. I can't see much benefit of a filesystem level version of 'undelete' besides working across OSs, and that'd actually require the OSs to support it. I guess it'd be a 'catch all' for different desktop environments/UIs/command lines.
This seems likely. I remember when HP bought out Palm, they were talking about using WebOS in printers, and having integration between phones/tablets/printers/every device running WebOS. This made some amount of sense when there were devices to integrate with, but now they're basically giving up on WebOS in mobile devices, there's not much point.