I used to live in Australia (in Newcastle, to be specific) and I should say that Ozzie Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) is pretty good at predicting weather. Some weather websites that use BoM data give slightly better results (in particular, WeatherZone) but still - very decent. WeatherZone has an app for Android, and I liked it so much that went ahead and bought a full version. Predictions for 24 hours are very accurate, and 5-day ahead are pretty decent, too.
What Apple just don't get it is this: no one needs a stupid remote control for the phone, but a phone on a wrist. Guys from NeptunePine got it right: this is a phone, an independent device that can make calls and browse the Web. I want to leave my smartphone at home and take a smaller phone on a wrist (for cycling \ hiking \ whatever).
What NeptunePine got wrong is the design and hardware: it looks dreadful, with crappy screen and abusmal battery life. I'm sure Apple can pick it up and make it a lot better. They have great screens, and I'm sure they can put a battery and a relatively weak (this is a smartwatch, not 4core 6" monster) processor in a smaller case.
The fact that copymonkeys like samsung don't get it is understandeable - they don't have anything to copy from. But Apple should be better than that. Besides, how hard could it be to put a small but decent retina-resolution screen with a smallish battery on a wrist?
From TFA it seems that we have "3.5 full time employees" (wow, so much for protecting the Mother-Earth!) and gazillion management morons who issue useless "audition reports". If half of those morons would be fired and the money directed to actual people who try to do at least something...
As a proud owner of Thinkpad 420 and X201, I want to say definitive YES! to this idea.
An ideal notebook will have:
1) a MATTE screen (no glassy nonsense, please!), preferably 4:3 (important for people who actually DO the job on the notebook instead watching films)
2) traditional, normal, sane keyboard (no ridiculous chicklet, please!)
3) decent computing power
4) standard power cable (like on all other Thinkpads)
5) ability to disassemble the whole thing with a screwdriver
And like other Slashdotters said, "Lenovo! Give me that X300 and take my money!!":-)
They will not put the comments link back. You don't get it: these are corporate slime. All that corporate slime and businesschmucks can do is "be like everybody else". They don't have a face - they are just suits, which is just the same for everybody else. When Cmdr Taco was at the steering wheel, this was Slashdot. When the corporate slime from Dice took over, I don't even want to click on 90% of stories. This is why MBA must be abolished. But alas - migrate to https://soylentnews.org/
You don't get it: the authors are from Political Science!
Don't you see it? No analysis, no statistics (hey, we are POLITICAL majors, c'mon!), buzzwords eveywhere ("De-globalizing hazards" and "Democratization of preparedness and response"). Pseudoscience in its finest: lots of talks and nothing valuable. Besides, one of the authors is so shy he didn't even include his education in the linkedin profile. They've just heard 3D printing is cool and pumped out a useless empty paper like TFA.
What is really depressing is that morons like the authors of TFA are employed, while thousands of engineers and scientists (who are a lot smarter) cannot find a job. Or maybe we can shut down all the social pseudoscience departments so the amount of hot air coming out of their lackluster graduates drops, which in turn cools down the planet and helps with global warming?:-)
Mod parent up - he is right on about science becoming a religion. I'm working in astronomical instrumentation (France), and I'm shocked to hear stuff like "we believe that the atmosphere follows von Karman model". Who the f%$# told you that?! You have no evidence of this, yet developing methods based on this shaky assumption. And then they are surprised that it does not work...
No one bothers with preproducibility anymore. I caught my colleagues repeatedly at cheating and outright cooking up results. The articles are written in a way that it is impossible to replicate the methods, let alone simulation/experimental results. I know couple of articles in mathematics that contain non-working algorithms. Those were "peer"-reviewed articles in good journals...
Another desese is called simulations. Good Lord, if only you knew how primitive and wrong those simulations are! I'm sitting right now and for 2 freaking months I'm trying to make a simulator (written by my boss) to work. When it does, those simulations are nowhere near the results he pulished in the paper. Half the questions about the code he answers like "we found THIS to work, but we don't know why". F%$#ing great! Am I in the laboratory of astrophysics, or maybe in astrology and homeopathy lab?
And don't get me even started about those so-called "soft sciences" like sociology...
> It's appropriate for high schools and colleges to be addressing this problem.
You sound like those social pseudo-science morons: "Oh, ah, teh teenz kill themselves! Letz control them more!!11"
People like that turned a school into a prison: you are confined to it against your will, they have a lot of control over you and you have none, nowadays there is a video surveillance on every corner (even inside classrooms). There is no reward - only punishment: try to ask your teacher or question the curriculum. To make things worse, they control what you think - so the school is even worse than prison!
Teens also know that there is no future for them - they are well aware of sky-rocketing youth unemployment. Their pissed off and disgruntled parents add more dark colours to this picture.
Teens are not allowed to do anything fun, thanks to feminised nanny-state society of fear and control. If something is not safe (=fun), it is instantly removed. Chemistry sets, anyone? Computers where you can hack and program? Making little explosions and bombs for fun? We did it, but teens nowadays are deprived from everything remotely fun.
They have no hope, constantly oppressed, censored, controlled. They are in prison - with no way out. No wonder they want to kill themselves - they are perfectly rational. There is no point to live in misery to the rest of their life.
Go and see War on Kids - it is biased at some points, but gives an overall impression of how far those feminised social morons went to convert a school into the worst Orwellian nightmare under "Think for teh children" pretence. You have sown fear - reap the harvest.
... brought this shithole called russia to complete degradation of engineering and scientific potential. Typical salary of research assistant used to be 200 USD (back in 2008 when I worked there). Almost impossible to buy any modern (i.e. Western) equipment - local hardware has exorbitant pricetags with chinese-type quality. Median age of "researchers" was 65 years old. Outdated equipment from museums (I remember doing optical experiments with calibrated light sources from 1950 (sic)). Stupid nationalism - you cannot write Ph.D. in English, and almost no subscriptions to modern journals. They still live in 1960x, thinking they are great. I'm surprised that India waited this long to ditch those pompous morons.
Full disclosure: I used to work in MePHI as a research associate. I left this shithole, like everyone who wanted to do something worth of their life, and never looked back.
Actually, it is worse: it is just a crappy board with shitty screen and stock Debian on top. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is going to cost you at lest 500 Euro!
Haven't we learned anything from, oh I don't know, Neo Free Runner? Ubuntu Phone anyone? Apparently, we did not. These are spectacular failures, and RTFA just brought us another one.
First, the price is ridiculous: they say 480 Euro for complete device. I look at my Google Nexus 5 and I'm telling you: even if this piece of crap will be able to run Android apps (which I doubt), it does not justify the pricetag. Especially considering its laughable specs - I mean, c'mon, atrocious 3.5 screen and 0.5Gb storage?!
The problem is worse: there is Linux on it. What are you talking about? Which software I could use on a phone? What, GIMP?! Kate?! Full-blown Firefox? I don't care what OS is inside, frankly - I want a working phone, with fscking software in it. And opensource does not provide it - not one bit. It will be glitchy and buggy mess, as always, and I don't want it. I use Debian on desktop, and it is OK (finally, in 2015) - but on mobile? You've got to be kidding me...
Bottom line: I'm willing to bet on 50 bucks that this piece of crap will not gain even 0.5 marketshare in 5 years from now - if any.
My life belongs to me, and if it sucks, I want to end it without any interference from religious morons and brainless public administrators like Ms. Barber. Removing the means of suicide does not solve or prevent the real problem: people have less and less reasons to live.
I want to kill myself not because I cannot cope with pressures and competition, but because stupid MBA morons hijacked the system and gained power over creative and talented people. Remember those socialized schmucks who bullied and ridiculed you in high school and universities? Now they are MPAs, MBAs and your bosses - they hate you and want to crush you, because deep inside they realize that they are worthless earthworms compared to creative people. I worked hard to solve difficult problems and hence earn my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, but thanks to banksters and businessdicks, the long-term postdoc positions have vanished and even short-term postodcs are nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.
My life belongs to me - not to a district attorney or moronic MPA. And when I want to end my life, I want my decision to be respected. It is not difficult to implement: farmers already use Controlled atmosphere killing for animals slaughter - inhaling inert gas guarantees a painless and quick death within minutes. You don't even have to build any new buildings or suicide booths - morgues are perfectly fine and can easily cope with those who want to voluntary end their lives.
Instead of stupid regulations, how about giving more reasons to live and removing the reasons for suicide? Or at least simplifying the whole process of ending one's own life? It is harder than writing useless regulations, for sure, and requires substantially more brainpower than a typical MPA possesses, but we still have some smart, educated, thinking people on this planet, aren't we?!
I know that I'm ruining my karma by posting this, but I'll do it anyway.
I am sick of those attention whores in Australian universities - those chinese and indians who do whatever they can to attract attention and push their funding agenda. I'm tired of articles like this, that claim a "breakthrough" when there is nothing even remotely near a good, reproducible and insightful science. It must be stopped, but unfortunately this means that a substantial bulk of those pseudoscience schmucks will be thrown away, and I know that it is not going to happen.
The other week we had a chinese paper shill Xinhua Wu from Monash Uni whose intellectual capacity was enough for taking apart a decades-old jet engine and using 20-years-old 3D-printing technology to replicate a non-working (!) mockup.
This time we have korean morons (you know, Jianjian Lin and Jung Ho Kim are typical Australian names) who claim a "revolution" again, and I'm quoting:
A high output voltage and current of about 120 V and 65 microA, respectively, were observed from a nanopatterned PDMS-based WTNG, while an output voltage and current of 30 V and 20 microA were obtained by the non-nanopatterned flat PDMS-based WTNG under the same compressive force
Slashdot crowd, can you hear me? MICROAMPERS! How many decades you need to wear this crap to charge even a small battery? How many shitty articles like this do we need to understand that those korean morons will never come up with anything but insignificant incremental improvements?! How many times do we have to get depressed to realize that University of Wollongong, Australia, is nowhere near top-20 ozzie universities and has never done anything remotely important?
Indeed, this spectacular failure MUST be a lesson for those opensource yahoos and pottering-like primadonnas. However, I'm not sure if they learn this lesson.
The biggest problems with Linux phones are not specs, or drivers, or hardware, but:
1. UI polish. I bough that horrible piece of sh%t called Nokia N800. The UI sucked like an old Vietnamese prostitute, pardon me. And this was not the worst one: NeoFree Runner anyone?! The phone where you needed to use terminal to send SMS? Who the **** will buy this piece of crap? No one, and this is why Ubuntu phones will be collecting dust on shelves (I've been saying this for years).
2. User Applications. You hear me, Canonical morons? I said USER application! No, WhireShark, ssh, and gcc are not for a regular user. The apps must do something useful, and do it well. No, crashing every 2 minutes is not acceptable (unlike your desktop trash). Because you competing with Android and iOS, you should be at least on par.
3. Apps installation process. God forbid you messing with debian-style repositories - this is a sure path to nightmarish demise of the whole platform. No dependencies, no fuss, no repos. AppStore was a great invention, and is perfect for mobile devices (app sideloading in Android is good, I hope they will not remove this feature).
In short: Ubuntu phone (just like every other opensource phone) is a failure by design. This is because UI is always an after-though of unpaid designer wannabies, apps are half-baked crap that crashes every time you tap in a wrong place, and the whole installation process (go type a debian repository address on a tiny screen!) is usually typical Linux distro fiasco. Add to this pile an outdated hardware, stupid bugs (we don't have QA - our users will do this for free!), miniscule number of apps, low built quality, and non-existent marketing - and there you go! Opensource fiasco of the Year!
>> a program that utilized a context-free grammar system to spit out full-length, auto-generated poems.
Well, if context-free grammar is somehow a news for./ crowd (hardly), then SCIgen is worth mentioning as well. Heck, SCIgen-generated garbage passed as a good science, not just some lousy "poetry".
Writing some clunky pseudo-poetry for an obscure undergrad mag is one thing, pumping out a full-blown scientific article with figures and references (and getting accepted to some peer-reviewed journals!) is quite another level of achievements. And speaking about achievements, SCIgen is routinely used to embarrass those corporative paper shills from Elsevier (yay, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation!) and IEEE (WMSCI 2005).
^^^ I second this: Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX sounds very much what OP is looking for. Anywhere MX mouse has a very good wheel and a special third button with middle click located slightly below the wheel (I use Debian as my desktop OS and I middle click is a need). The mouse uses 2 AA batteries (and is fine with rechargeable ones), lasts months, wireless (perfect for notebooks), and has two additional buttons on the left side, and works on almost any surfaces. You can easily reprogram buttons using xmodmap in Linux.
I don't know about "usable", but there is actually a port of the GNU/Octave to Android. It is not some lousy mimic webapp (like Matlab crappy "cloud-run" app), but a full-blown port of the Octave to Android. The app itself is small, but to make it work you have to download Octave Main Package that is freaking HUGE (about 65Mb), but it works!
Well, it's not that you can do full-blown simulations on it, but you can install other toolboxes separately and run some calculations. You can work with matrices, trigonometry, random numbers - not very convenient on a smartphone (it uses a Terminal Emulator to run) and no sexy GUI (opensource - what do you want...), but still pretty awesome.
Other than this, I use Andie Graph emulator of famous TI-8x calculators. You need to get a ROM of a device (Google is your friend), but it can run TI-86 on your smartphone. Useful and free of charge.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had enough of this shit. Time to leave.
I used to live in Australia (in Newcastle, to be specific) and I should say that Ozzie Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) is pretty good at predicting weather. Some weather websites that use BoM data give slightly better results (in particular, WeatherZone) but still - very decent. WeatherZone has an app for Android, and I liked it so much that went ahead and bought a full version. Predictions for 24 hours are very accurate, and 5-day ahead are pretty decent, too.
What Apple just don't get it is this: no one needs a stupid remote control for the phone, but a phone on a wrist. Guys from NeptunePine got it right: this is a phone, an independent device that can make calls and browse the Web. I want to leave my smartphone at home and take a smaller phone on a wrist (for cycling \ hiking \ whatever).
What NeptunePine got wrong is the design and hardware: it looks dreadful, with crappy screen and abusmal battery life. I'm sure Apple can pick it up and make it a lot better. They have great screens, and I'm sure they can put a battery and a relatively weak (this is a smartwatch, not 4core 6" monster) processor in a smaller case.
The fact that copymonkeys like samsung don't get it is understandeable - they don't have anything to copy from. But Apple should be better than that. Besides, how hard could it be to put a small but decent retina-resolution screen with a smallish battery on a wrist?
From TFA it seems that we have "3.5 full time employees" (wow, so much for protecting the Mother-Earth!) and gazillion management morons who issue useless "audition reports". If half of those morons would be fired and the money directed to actual people who try to do at least something...
As a proud owner of Thinkpad 420 and X201, I want to say definitive YES! to this idea.
:-)
An ideal notebook will have:
1) a MATTE screen (no glassy nonsense, please!), preferably 4:3 (important for people who actually DO the job on the notebook instead watching films)
2) traditional, normal, sane keyboard (no ridiculous chicklet, please!)
3) decent computing power
4) standard power cable (like on all other Thinkpads)
5) ability to disassemble the whole thing with a screwdriver
And like other Slashdotters said, "Lenovo! Give me that X300 and take my money!!"
They will not put the comments link back. You don't get it: these are corporate slime. All that corporate slime and businesschmucks can do is "be like everybody else". They don't have a face - they are just suits, which is just the same for everybody else. When Cmdr Taco was at the steering wheel, this was Slashdot. When the corporate slime from Dice took over, I don't even want to click on 90% of stories. This is why MBA must be abolished. But alas - migrate to https://soylentnews.org/
will have a tremendous success in mother-Russia and their *cough* roads *cough*.
:-)
And who was whining about Michigan above, eh?!
You don't get it: the authors are from Political Science!
:-)
Don't you see it? No analysis, no statistics (hey, we are POLITICAL majors, c'mon!), buzzwords eveywhere ("De-globalizing hazards" and "Democratization of preparedness and response"). Pseudoscience in its finest: lots of talks and nothing valuable. Besides, one of the authors is so shy he didn't even include his education in the linkedin profile. They've just heard 3D printing is cool and pumped out a useless empty paper like TFA.
What is really depressing is that morons like the authors of TFA are employed, while thousands of engineers and scientists (who are a lot smarter) cannot find a job. Or maybe we can shut down all the social pseudoscience departments so the amount of hot air coming out of their lackluster graduates drops, which in turn cools down the planet and helps with global warming?
Mod parent up - he is right on about science becoming a religion. I'm working in astronomical instrumentation (France), and I'm shocked to hear stuff like "we believe that the atmosphere follows von Karman model". Who the f%$# told you that?! You have no evidence of this, yet developing methods based on this shaky assumption. And then they are surprised that it does not work...
No one bothers with preproducibility anymore. I caught my colleagues repeatedly at cheating and outright cooking up results. The articles are written in a way that it is impossible to replicate the methods, let alone simulation/experimental results. I know couple of articles in mathematics that contain non-working algorithms. Those were "peer"-reviewed articles in good journals...
Another desese is called simulations. Good Lord, if only you knew how primitive and wrong those simulations are! I'm sitting right now and for 2 freaking months I'm trying to make a simulator (written by my boss) to work. When it does, those simulations are nowhere near the results he pulished in the paper. Half the questions about the code he answers like "we found THIS to work, but we don't know why". F%$#ing great! Am I in the laboratory of astrophysics, or maybe in astrology and homeopathy lab?
And don't get me even started about those so-called "soft sciences" like sociology...
> It's appropriate for high schools and colleges to be addressing this problem.
You sound like those social pseudo-science morons: "Oh, ah, teh teenz kill themselves! Letz control them more!!11"
People like that turned a school into a prison: you are confined to it against your will, they have a lot of control over you and you have none, nowadays there is a video surveillance on every corner (even inside classrooms). There is no reward - only punishment: try to ask your teacher or question the curriculum. To make things worse, they control what you think - so the school is even worse than prison!
Teens also know that there is no future for them - they are well aware of sky-rocketing youth unemployment. Their pissed off and disgruntled parents add more dark colours to this picture.
Teens are not allowed to do anything fun, thanks to feminised nanny-state society of fear and control. If something is not safe (=fun), it is instantly removed. Chemistry sets, anyone? Computers where you can hack and program? Making little explosions and bombs for fun? We did it, but teens nowadays are deprived from everything remotely fun.
They have no hope, constantly oppressed, censored, controlled. They are in prison - with no way out. No wonder they want to kill themselves - they are perfectly rational. There is no point to live in misery to the rest of their life.
Go and see War on Kids - it is biased at some points, but gives an overall impression of how far those feminised social morons went to convert a school into the worst Orwellian nightmare under "Think for teh children" pretence. You have sown fear - reap the harvest.
... brought this shithole called russia to complete degradation of engineering and scientific potential. Typical salary of research assistant used to be 200 USD (back in 2008 when I worked there). Almost impossible to buy any modern (i.e. Western) equipment - local hardware has exorbitant pricetags with chinese-type quality. Median age of "researchers" was 65 years old. Outdated equipment from museums (I remember doing optical experiments with calibrated light sources from 1950 (sic)). Stupid nationalism - you cannot write Ph.D. in English, and almost no subscriptions to modern journals. They still live in 1960x, thinking they are great. I'm surprised that India waited this long to ditch those pompous morons.
Full disclosure: I used to work in MePHI as a research associate. I left this shithole, like everyone who wanted to do something worth of their life, and never looked back.
Actually, it is worse: it is just a crappy board with shitty screen and stock Debian on top. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is going to cost you at lest 500 Euro!
Haven't we learned anything from, oh I don't know, Neo Free Runner? Ubuntu Phone anyone? Apparently, we did not. These are spectacular failures, and RTFA just brought us another one.
First, the price is ridiculous: they say 480 Euro for complete device. I look at my Google Nexus 5 and I'm telling you: even if this piece of crap will be able to run Android apps (which I doubt), it does not justify the pricetag. Especially considering its laughable specs - I mean, c'mon, atrocious 3.5 screen and 0.5Gb storage?!
The problem is worse: there is Linux on it. What are you talking about? Which software I could use on a phone? What, GIMP?! Kate?! Full-blown Firefox? I don't care what OS is inside, frankly - I want a working phone, with fscking software in it. And opensource does not provide it - not one bit. It will be glitchy and buggy mess, as always, and I don't want it. I use Debian on desktop, and it is OK (finally, in 2015) - but on mobile? You've got to be kidding me...
Bottom line: I'm willing to bet on 50 bucks that this piece of crap will not gain even 0.5 marketshare in 5 years from now - if any.
My life belongs to me, and if it sucks, I want to end it without any interference from religious morons and brainless public administrators like Ms. Barber. Removing the means of suicide does not solve or prevent the real problem: people have less and less reasons to live.
Why should I live and get education when engineering is off-shored to brainless indians and chinese?
Why should I live and contribute to knowledge if science and research is constantly mocked, ridiculed and deprived of funding?
Why should I live when I've been treated as a insignificant cog in a corporation (which is now true for everything - even universities are run like a business)?
Why should I live when some female bitch, whose mental capacity was enough only to graduate from an obscure secondary school in a german village, is sitting in EuroParliament and blathering about shutting down nuclear fission and fusion research?
Why should I live when postdocs are lasting months? What useful science could possibly be done in couple of months?!
Why should I live when even art and music became a commodity, and are forced to cater to lowest form of human waste?
Why should I live when imbecile politicians want to turn the whole country into a large maximum security prison?!
I want to kill myself not because I cannot cope with pressures and competition, but because stupid MBA morons hijacked the system and gained power over creative and talented people. Remember those socialized schmucks who bullied and ridiculed you in high school and universities? Now they are MPAs, MBAs and your bosses - they hate you and want to crush you, because deep inside they realize that they are worthless earthworms compared to creative people. I worked hard to solve difficult problems and hence earn my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, but thanks to banksters and businessdicks, the long-term postdoc positions have vanished and even short-term postodcs are nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.
My life belongs to me - not to a district attorney or moronic MPA. And when I want to end my life, I want my decision to be respected. It is not difficult to implement: farmers already use Controlled atmosphere killing for animals slaughter - inhaling inert gas guarantees a painless and quick death within minutes. You don't even have to build any new buildings or suicide booths - morgues are perfectly fine and can easily cope with those who want to voluntary end their lives.
Instead of stupid regulations, how about giving more reasons to live and removing the reasons for suicide? Or at least simplifying the whole process of ending one's own life? It is harder than writing useless regulations, for sure, and requires substantially more brainpower than a typical MPA possesses, but we still have some smart, educated, thinking people on this planet, aren't we?!
I am sick of those attention whores in Australian universities - those chinese and indians who do whatever they can to attract attention and push their funding agenda. I'm tired of articles like this, that claim a "breakthrough" when there is nothing even remotely near a good, reproducible and insightful science. It must be stopped, but unfortunately this means that a substantial bulk of those pseudoscience schmucks will be thrown away, and I know that it is not going to happen.
The other week we had a chinese paper shill Xinhua Wu from Monash Uni whose intellectual capacity was enough for taking apart a decades-old jet engine and using 20-years-old 3D-printing technology to replicate a non-working (!) mockup. This time we have korean morons (you know, Jianjian Lin and Jung Ho Kim are typical Australian names) who claim a "revolution" again, and I'm quoting:
A high output voltage and current of about 120 V and 65 microA, respectively, were observed from a nanopatterned PDMS-based WTNG, while an output voltage and current of 30 V and 20 microA were obtained by the non-nanopatterned flat PDMS-based WTNG under the same compressive force
Slashdot crowd, can you hear me? MICROAMPERS! How many decades you need to wear this crap to charge even a small battery? How many shitty articles like this do we need to understand that those korean morons will never come up with anything but insignificant incremental improvements?! How many times do we have to get depressed to realize that University of Wollongong, Australia, is nowhere near top-20 ozzie universities and has never done anything remotely important?
Indeed, this spectacular failure MUST be a lesson for those opensource yahoos and pottering-like primadonnas. However, I'm not sure if they learn this lesson.
The biggest problems with Linux phones are not specs, or drivers, or hardware, but:
1. UI polish. I bough that horrible piece of sh%t called Nokia N800. The UI sucked like an old Vietnamese prostitute, pardon me. And this was not the worst one: NeoFree Runner anyone?! The phone where you needed to use terminal to send SMS? Who the **** will buy this piece of crap? No one, and this is why Ubuntu phones will be collecting dust on shelves (I've been saying this for years).
2. User Applications. You hear me, Canonical morons? I said USER application! No, WhireShark, ssh, and gcc are not for a regular user. The apps must do something useful, and do it well. No, crashing every 2 minutes is not acceptable (unlike your desktop trash). Because you competing with Android and iOS, you should be at least on par.
3. Apps installation process. God forbid you messing with debian-style repositories - this is a sure path to nightmarish demise of the whole platform. No dependencies, no fuss, no repos. AppStore was a great invention, and is perfect for mobile devices (app sideloading in Android is good, I hope they will not remove this feature).
In short: Ubuntu phone (just like every other opensource phone) is a failure by design. This is because UI is always an after-though of unpaid designer wannabies, apps are half-baked crap that crashes every time you tap in a wrong place, and the whole installation process (go type a debian repository address on a tiny screen!) is usually typical Linux distro fiasco. Add to this pile an outdated hardware, stupid bugs (we don't have QA - our users will do this for free!), miniscule number of apps, low built quality, and non-existent marketing - and there you go! Opensource fiasco of the Year!
>> a program that utilized a context-free grammar system to spit out full-length, auto-generated poems. ./ crowd (hardly), then SCIgen is worth mentioning as well. Heck, SCIgen-generated garbage passed as a good science, not just some lousy "poetry".
Well, if context-free grammar is somehow a news for
Writing some clunky pseudo-poetry for an obscure undergrad mag is one thing, pumping out a full-blown scientific article with figures and references (and getting accepted to some peer-reviewed journals!) is quite another level of achievements. And speaking about achievements, SCIgen is routinely used to embarrass those corporative paper shills from Elsevier (yay, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation!) and IEEE (WMSCI 2005).
^^^ I second this: Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX sounds very much what OP is looking for. Anywhere MX mouse has a very good wheel and a special third button with middle click located slightly below the wheel (I use Debian as my desktop OS and I middle click is a need). The mouse uses 2 AA batteries (and is fine with rechargeable ones), lasts months, wireless (perfect for notebooks), and has two additional buttons on the left side, and works on almost any surfaces. You can easily reprogram buttons using xmodmap in Linux.
I don't know about "usable", but there is actually a port of the GNU/Octave to Android. It is not some lousy mimic webapp (like Matlab crappy "cloud-run" app), but a full-blown port of the Octave to Android. The app itself is small, but to make it work you have to download Octave Main Package that is freaking HUGE (about 65Mb), but it works!
Well, it's not that you can do full-blown simulations on it, but you can install other toolboxes separately and run some calculations. You can work with matrices, trigonometry, random numbers - not very convenient on a smartphone (it uses a Terminal Emulator to run) and no sexy GUI (opensource - what do you want...), but still pretty awesome.
Other than this, I use Andie Graph emulator of famous TI-8x calculators. You need to get a ROM of a device (Google is your friend), but it can run TI-86 on your smartphone. Useful and free of charge.