its a nice, utopian idea - a single cross-platform meta environment in which to code that has really easy GUI elements, with a really easy programming language to glue it all together with super-fast 3d vector graphics toolkit....
meanwhile, back in reality. You get the best we've got with native code, which can host an OpenGL environment if you really wanted and you get as fast a runtime as you can get. If you really want your HTML environment (which, to be fair is a good platform for some types of games) then wait for Apache Cordova to get ported. I've found that to be good for the other platforms, there's no reason why it shouldn't arrive for WinPho8.
(PS websockets... don't scale to millions of simultaneous users)
no, its to take away their votes. They can get gobs of money any time they like for all kinds of pork barrel projects and lobbyist favours... but only if they're in power. Threaten to take that away with a huge internet campaign saying they are useless fools and they'll do everything they can for you.... and then go back to their usual practices, but you'll have won a small concession from them first.
I wouldn't be so sure - those assembly lines are already full to bursting making iPads, iPhones and Galaxy S3s. To fit another less-profitable table in there would mean reducing the number of more-profitable devices, so Microsoft may find difficulty in sourcing enough assembly line time to build their tablets.
On the other hand, if sales are as good as windows phone 7, then they should have no problem whatsoever filling demand, *chortle*.
but then there is also the embedded browser factor - I open my newsreader app and that counts as a IE page view, or I open my OSS dev tool and that counts as a webkit view.
Nowadays its not easy to really get anything other than a broad estimate of browser usage.
true, you can just port Apache Cordova to every device, but that does pre-supposed an OS with hooks that can e accessed from that platform.
One thing to note: I have an app on my Android system that shows ad networks, but will also show the dev tool used - and a very large number of the games I have are all using the NDK. I don't think that's coincidence, so a native system will be required, if not at first and if not for all apps.
iOS started life running HTML and js, now it's native only. Anddroid started with Java, now it too has native. Windows phone 8 is rumoured to prefer native, but we'll see how that goes.
So Samsung has the rump of Meego in the form of Tizen... surely 3rd time lucky will give us the phone OS that will take mobile computing a huge step forward this time?
Mind you, they might just push Bada as well, and end up being the new Nokia.
and what's more - you can't accidentally unlock the phone just be picking it up, which could be awkward if youy're on the bus and the person behind/next to you sees what you were doing with it before it locked last....
unfortunately, this also means that big corporations can use "our highly trained team of lawyers will tie you up in legal processes that it'll cost you far more than you can afford.... and you can't even claim costs when err, if you win, haha" as a tool to intimidate smaller organisations and individuals.
its got nothing to do with technical reasons, everything will be driven by the business at MS, and currently they seem to be reducing their fractured development teams by consolidating them all around a single platform runtime - WinRT.
So, expect WinPhone 8 to be built on the same (cut down) codebase as Window s8, and all new phone apps to require WinRT.
What that means for native v.net development, WinRT is entirely native, and MS has noticed that native code sucks less resources and goes faster than managed, so expect to see a lot more native in the future. So, assuming all the above, does it make sense for MS to support.NET on ARM? Probably not. It'll be a lot of expense to support something that they are already beginning to push towards legacy status.
I'm not so sure - I mean, sure he's taken something and polished it up to technobabble, but suggestion is very powerful, as is hypnosis, and the same can apply to Neuro-linguistic programming. Even cognitive-behaviour therapy could be considered as some form of language-therapy, so Stephenson's Sumerian as a primitive language that affects us at a more instinctive level and has a stronger effect.
Well, that's my rationale for it - but whatever, the big thing is that its no as unbelievable as much of the stuff that hollywood has given us over the years, so suspend your disbelief a teeny bit and you'll enjoy it more.
Mind you, you seem to accept supercooled dog brains implanted into supercharged robot bodies as acceptable:-)
Our food is a lot better now due to a bit of an outcry a couple of years ago when a TV chef noticed what school kids were being fed (some now-infamous "turkey twizzlers" which were mechanically-recovered, fat added. deep fried junk) and did a TV series about it where he tried to change a school's habits off frozen crap that would be reheated, to something that at least resembled food. Obviously the programme stated with the best intentions that went a bit sour when the cost of the chef's fancy food was priced up, then the kids refused it because it looked like food and not deep-friend junk that they like, and then from the school who just didn't like change and would have had to spend money on preparing the proper food.. the eventually winning out. (classic TV formula).
But the big deal is that he did get school dinners on the political landscape, and has had a lot of media attention ever since.
He went to the states to do a similar programme, which I found amusing due to the much more 'protectionist' attitude from the school authorities.
the scary thing is the cost of the dinners - 37p per child in the UK, 77c in the USA. That's how much your kids are worth.
all 3... you forget that the N900 has outsold Windows Phone so far, so much so that Nokia and Microsoft refuse to say just how many have been activated.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25569... In other words, the Nokia N9 outsold the Lumia by 3 to 1 - even though the N9 is considerably more expensive. I'm starting to see why Elop was trying so hard to turn the N9 into a failure. As a Microsoft exec, he knew that the device and its MeeGo operating system were better than he let on....
There's still no hard evidence for all this, but it's looking less and less like a crazy theory.
That's why Nokia should, if they had any sense, have continued to develop Symbian and a symbian-alike advanced OS (say, based on Linux) and not tell all their partners and developers that their platform is burning from underneath them.
Strangely, none of them are developing for Nokia anymore, who'd want to waste their time on something the CEO says is not going to exist in the future.
I'm disappointed with the ICS upgrade to my Android, but this happens - several versions in the number of new features overtakes the quality. It usually takes a full release to focus on quality instead, but it has to get worse before they'll realise it needs to get better. Windows Phone, effectively on v1, hasn't hit that hurdle yet - but it will (if it survives), just like everything else.
there's another factor that's forgotten, your wrist will suffer here - try it now, put the cursor at the bottom of the screen (say, where your word processing or other activity takes place, roughly), then move it right to the top to hit where the menu would be. Now return the mouse to the bottom again.
Some people will move their entire arm, but most will try to use the give in their fingers to make the movement, usually because their arm is resting on the desk. If you have to stretch to get it there, you'll find you have to twist your wrist slightly to get it back, at the least will have to put a lot more effort into moving your entire arm.
Now, a menu on the left might make more sense as left-right movement is much easier, but having to travel all the way to the top doesn't necessarily help. If you do alter your mouse settings to give you more screen movement per inch of physical movement, you'll just reduce your accuracy and end up hurting yourself in more localised mouse action instead.
The ultimate menu is one that appears when you want it, pops up where you are so you can use it immediately. Trouble is, I don't think the modern GUI systems are fast enough to allow for that - despite super-fast graphics and CPUs, I've found they always appear sluggishly and end up fading away again because I can't respond to access them when they demand. Maybe we should just stick with right-click menus!
really, they're not disarming you - they're just making you a little more responsible for your actions. It really doesn't matter if your guns have your name and address stamped on them, you still get to have guns and you still get to shoot whoever you want - only now, you're less likely to be able to shoot anyone and walk away thinking no-one will know you did it. If your shooting someone was above-board, you'd be hanging around to explain why you did it anyway. So what's the fuss about?
"We forg...err...we *have* the defendant's computerized gun and ammo purchase receipts from our DHS/BATF records
how does microstamping make any difference to this little scenario you penned? If the 'homeland security' system is this corrupt, they don't need microstamping to end up at the same result. Hell, today they can just say "umm, national security would be compromised if we told you what we know about this guy, so just trust us, he's guilty"
so we blame the tech media for looking at Fedora with the unstable release and shouting out how bad it was, that started a cascade of copycat complaints. I can see that happens.
Its usually Microsoft that gets that kind of treatment here.
"Industry lobby group Partnership for A New American Economy last month released a study that claims the U.S. will face a shortage of 224,000 tech workers by 2018 unless more native workers are taken on and trained!
fixed that for them, I wonder if they appreciate my contribution on their behalf.
I'm not so sure - Firefox has a stable and a beta branch - unless you specifically go looking for the beta (ie know its there) you'll get the stable, so consumers get stable, "power users" can have beta if they prefer. Some can have the alpha releases too if they take the trouble to find where they live.
As for KDE, I don't think the problem was that it didn't work, it just didn't work well enough, for a desktop environment it isn't enough to be functional, it has to be polished and usable as well. Maybe that was the problem with it - the KDE guys had tested it and found that it worked as designed, so they shipped it. It just needed more iterations to make it usable for the common man.
bear in mind most companies use single hardware providers anyway - you get a better deal, better (well, single point of contact) support and single purchase orders if you buy all your computer gear from a company like Dell or IBM. So most do.
You sometimes get 2 providers - one for clients and one for the datacentre, but you almost never get a mishmash of bits bought from all over.
for power mainly, its easier to plonk it onto a dock than it is to play "where's the cable hiding this time". The Samsung Galaxy 3 comes with a dock charger now, and a wireless display dongle (ie you attach the dongle to your TV and it mirrors your phone display)
While I don't think these are sufficient to replace a PC, it shows we're slowly moving in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
its a nice, utopian idea - a single cross-platform meta environment in which to code that has really easy GUI elements, with a really easy programming language to glue it all together with super-fast 3d vector graphics toolkit....
meanwhile, back in reality. You get the best we've got with native code, which can host an OpenGL environment if you really wanted and you get as fast a runtime as you can get. If you really want your HTML environment (which, to be fair is a good platform for some types of games) then wait for Apache Cordova to get ported. I've found that to be good for the other platforms, there's no reason why it shouldn't arrive for WinPho8.
(PS websockets... don't scale to millions of simultaneous users)
no, its to take away their votes. They can get gobs of money any time they like for all kinds of pork barrel projects and lobbyist favours... but only if they're in power. Threaten to take that away with a huge internet campaign saying they are useless fools and they'll do everything they can for you.... and then go back to their usual practices, but you'll have won a small concession from them first.
I wouldn't be so sure - those assembly lines are already full to bursting making iPads, iPhones and Galaxy S3s. To fit another less-profitable table in there would mean reducing the number of more-profitable devices, so Microsoft may find difficulty in sourcing enough assembly line time to build their tablets.
On the other hand, if sales are as good as windows phone 7, then they should have no problem whatsoever filling demand, *chortle*.
but then there is also the embedded browser factor - I open my newsreader app and that counts as a IE page view, or I open my OSS dev tool and that counts as a webkit view.
Nowadays its not easy to really get anything other than a broad estimate of browser usage.
true, you can just port Apache Cordova to every device, but that does pre-supposed an OS with hooks that can e accessed from that platform.
One thing to note: I have an app on my Android system that shows ad networks, but will also show the dev tool used - and a very large number of the games I have are all using the NDK. I don't think that's coincidence, so a native system will be required, if not at first and if not for all apps.
iOS started life running HTML and js, now it's native only. Anddroid started with Java, now it too has native. Windows phone 8 is rumoured to prefer native, but we'll see how that goes.
So Samsung has the rump of Meego in the form of Tizen... surely 3rd time lucky will give us the phone OS that will take mobile computing a huge step forward this time?
Mind you, they might just push Bada as well, and end up being the new Nokia.
and what's more - you can't accidentally unlock the phone just be picking it up, which could be awkward if youy're on the bus and the person behind/next to you sees what you were doing with it before it locked last....
So what exactly is the problem...
Microsoft removing all that easy cross-platform stuff in the next version of Windows :)
unfortunately, this also means that big corporations can use "our highly trained team of lawyers will tie you up in legal processes that it'll cost you far more than you can afford.... and you can't even claim costs when err, if you win, haha" as a tool to intimidate smaller organisations and individuals.
its got nothing to do with technical reasons, everything will be driven by the business at MS, and currently they seem to be reducing their fractured development teams by consolidating them all around a single platform runtime - WinRT.
So, expect WinPhone 8 to be built on the same (cut down) codebase as Window s8, and all new phone apps to require WinRT.
What that means for native v .net development, WinRT is entirely native, and MS has noticed that native code sucks less resources and goes faster than managed, so expect to see a lot more native in the future. So, assuming all the above, does it make sense for MS to support .NET on ARM? Probably not. It'll be a lot of expense to support something that they are already beginning to push towards legacy status.
I'm not so sure - I mean, sure he's taken something and polished it up to technobabble, but suggestion is very powerful, as is hypnosis, and the same can apply to Neuro-linguistic programming. Even cognitive-behaviour therapy could be considered as some form of language-therapy, so Stephenson's Sumerian as a primitive language that affects us at a more instinctive level and has a stronger effect.
Well, that's my rationale for it - but whatever, the big thing is that its no as unbelievable as much of the stuff that hollywood has given us over the years, so suspend your disbelief a teeny bit and you'll enjoy it more.
Mind you, you seem to accept supercooled dog brains implanted into supercharged robot bodies as acceptable :-)
Our food is a lot better now due to a bit of an outcry a couple of years ago when a TV chef noticed what school kids were being fed (some now-infamous "turkey twizzlers" which were mechanically-recovered, fat added. deep fried junk) and did a TV series about it where he tried to change a school's habits off frozen crap that would be reheated, to something that at least resembled food. Obviously the programme stated with the best intentions that went a bit sour when the cost of the chef's fancy food was priced up, then the kids refused it because it looked like food and not deep-friend junk that they like, and then from the school who just didn't like change and would have had to spend money on preparing the proper food.. the eventually winning out. (classic TV formula).
But the big deal is that he did get school dinners on the political landscape, and has had a lot of media attention ever since.
He went to the states to do a similar programme, which I found amusing due to the much more 'protectionist' attitude from the school authorities.
the scary thing is the cost of the dinners - 37p per child in the UK, 77c in the USA. That's how much your kids are worth.
all 3... you forget that the N900 has outsold Windows Phone so far, so much so that Nokia and Microsoft refuse to say just how many have been activated.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25569 ... In other words, the Nokia N9 outsold the Lumia by 3 to 1 - even though the N9 is considerably more expensive. I'm starting to see why Elop was trying so hard to turn the N9 into a failure. As a Microsoft exec, he knew that the device and its MeeGo operating system were better than he let on. ...
There's still no hard evidence for all this, but it's looking less and less like a crazy theory.
That's why Nokia should, if they had any sense, have continued to develop Symbian and a symbian-alike advanced OS (say, based on Linux) and not tell all their partners and developers that their platform is burning from underneath them.
Strangely, none of them are developing for Nokia anymore, who'd want to waste their time on something the CEO says is not going to exist in the future.
I'm disappointed with the ICS upgrade to my Android, but this happens - several versions in the number of new features overtakes the quality. It usually takes a full release to focus on quality instead, but it has to get worse before they'll realise it needs to get better. Windows Phone, effectively on v1, hasn't hit that hurdle yet - but it will (if it survives), just like everything else.
there's another factor that's forgotten, your wrist will suffer here - try it now, put the cursor at the bottom of the screen (say, where your word processing or other activity takes place, roughly), then move it right to the top to hit where the menu would be. Now return the mouse to the bottom again.
Some people will move their entire arm, but most will try to use the give in their fingers to make the movement, usually because their arm is resting on the desk. If you have to stretch to get it there, you'll find you have to twist your wrist slightly to get it back, at the least will have to put a lot more effort into moving your entire arm.
Now, a menu on the left might make more sense as left-right movement is much easier, but having to travel all the way to the top doesn't necessarily help. If you do alter your mouse settings to give you more screen movement per inch of physical movement, you'll just reduce your accuracy and end up hurting yourself in more localised mouse action instead.
The ultimate menu is one that appears when you want it, pops up where you are so you can use it immediately. Trouble is, I don't think the modern GUI systems are fast enough to allow for that - despite super-fast graphics and CPUs, I've found they always appear sluggishly and end up fading away again because I can't respond to access them when they demand. Maybe we should just stick with right-click menus!
really, they're not disarming you - they're just making you a little more responsible for your actions. It really doesn't matter if your guns have your name and address stamped on them, you still get to have guns and you still get to shoot whoever you want - only now, you're less likely to be able to shoot anyone and walk away thinking no-one will know you did it. If your shooting someone was above-board, you'd be hanging around to explain why you did it anyway. So what's the fuss about?
"We forg...err...we *have* the defendant's computerized gun and ammo purchase receipts from our DHS/BATF records
how does microstamping make any difference to this little scenario you penned? If the 'homeland security' system is this corrupt, they don't need microstamping to end up at the same result. Hell, today they can just say "umm, national security would be compromised if we told you what we know about this guy, so just trust us, he's guilty"
can anyone join this, or is it only for patent holders who "throw their patents into the pool"?
It would be wicked cool if anyone, including independent software developers, could join and gain the protection offered from the trolls too.
so we blame the tech media for looking at Fedora with the unstable release and shouting out how bad it was, that started a cascade of copycat complaints. I can see that happens.
Its usually Microsoft that gets that kind of treatment here.
"Industry lobby group Partnership for A New American Economy last month released a study that claims the U.S. will face a shortage of 224,000 tech workers by 2018 unless more native workers are taken on and trained!
fixed that for them, I wonder if they appreciate my contribution on their behalf.
I use ebuddy which works, I can't remember the other one I tried but uninstalled (I don't tend to chat much on the phone)
you could try googling.... http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/09/android-im-apps-which-one-should-you-use/
http://lifehacker.com/5803525/the-best-instant-messaging-application-for-android
I'm not so sure - Firefox has a stable and a beta branch - unless you specifically go looking for the beta (ie know its there) you'll get the stable, so consumers get stable, "power users" can have beta if they prefer. Some can have the alpha releases too if they take the trouble to find where they live.
As for KDE, I don't think the problem was that it didn't work, it just didn't work well enough, for a desktop environment it isn't enough to be functional, it has to be polished and usable as well. Maybe that was the problem with it - the KDE guys had tested it and found that it worked as designed, so they shipped it. It just needed more iterations to make it usable for the common man.
absolutely wrong, the phrase "release early, release often" means you get your software out for people to see it, use it, test it and offer comments.
the problem here was that KDE people didn't have a decent release mechanism that distinguished between stabel and experimental.
bear in mind most companies use single hardware providers anyway - you get a better deal, better (well, single point of contact) support and single purchase orders if you buy all your computer gear from a company like Dell or IBM. So most do.
You sometimes get 2 providers - one for clients and one for the datacentre, but you almost never get a mishmash of bits bought from all over.
I wonder why a dock is needed at all.
for power mainly, its easier to plonk it onto a dock than it is to play "where's the cable hiding this time". The Samsung Galaxy 3 comes with a dock charger now, and a wireless display dongle (ie you attach the dongle to your TV and it mirrors your phone display)
While I don't think these are sufficient to replace a PC, it shows we're slowly moving in the right direction.