OnePlus One is significant because it is now the go-to unlocked smartphone for the geeks. The OS story is mildly interesting. Another Android mod released...
I am not quite sure what you're talking about. The tracks and their skylines are beautiful, and there is always some close, often wheel to wheel, racing for the lead right until the end. The drivers are very accomplished open wheel racers. You can't compare them to the F1 top five or so, but overall they're just as good or better than a median F1 racers. In fact, many of them had a considerable amount of F1 seat time, either as a race or test driver.
And I am sorry, and I personally don't know the product is crap because of blah blah blah. Sounds like you have created a strawman argument to defend your elitist viewpoint here.
That's totally fine. You should realize that among the racing fans there are far more fans of pure racing than the nerds. This is why Formula 1 is far FAR more more popular than WEC will ever be, even though arguably WEC is more advanced tech-wise.
And so as a fan if racing, rather of the technological dick waving, I see a lot of potential in FE racing. The skylines are beautiful, the racers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, many with quite a bit of time in Formula 1 and GP2 seats, and there is always some good competition and wheel to wheel racing up to the end of race. The races are about one hour short which is perfect for our world of living a busy life and having a short attention span.
Clearly, you haven't watched any of Formula E races and in fact you have a very superficial understanding of F1 or other motorsports.
In the FE races I have seen so far, the skylines are beautiful, the drivers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, the cars go fast, and there was plenty of close wheel racing in the first five races so far. What else do you want?
On a really good year of Formula 1 racing, F1 may be more fun to watch than the first season of FE. But every other season, F1 is a major snooze fest that only die hard fans will watch. Case in point, the five years of Schumacher's continuous domination, and then four years of continuous RedBull Vettel domination, and specially years 2011 and 2013.
... , because the language has so many features that nobody but language experts understand all of them.
And I think that's fine. C++ is not an every day go-to programming language. Its use should be reserved for writing heavyweight applications (like the desktop environments, productivity apps, etc), servers, and numerical code. Considering the complexity of a typical c++ app codebase as well as the language itself, only the experts should touch it.
There are a lot of people who are still undecided, the swing voters. I think the use of private email will come up right in the middle of election campaign again.
Yep. That's what I was talking about. "Linux" is an unwieldy mess of various "metoo" distributions, "metoo" desktop environments, unstable and always changing APIs (starting down at the kernel, whose developers refuse to support a stable API for binary drivers all the way to desktop APIs who break all APIs with each major release), etc. Why would a mainstream desktop user want to track this mess? Nothing has really changed in the Linux world since the 90s. It's a great OS for the tinkerers and tweakers. I you're one of them, just shut up and enjoy this great OS instead of trying to show it down the throats of the mainstream. It never worked and will never work.
To make this work, some big company, like google or Intel, would have to throw its weight behind this idea (basically, like what happened with Android).
I came to this conclusion back in the year 1999 or so, when I saw the emergence of two major GUI systems for Linux, Gnome and KDE. Since then, the Linux desktop was an always changing hydra consisting of numerous GUIs, fast changing APIs, etc. Linux distributions fill pretty nice the nice of a power desktop user's OS. The kinds you run into academia, engineering, etc. But I don't see how it could become a mainstream OS. The only way for Linux distro to become mainstream is to have some kind of benevolent dictator in the form of a large company (like google) to create a working GUI and make all hardware vendors to ship it (e.g. Android).
They could have survived as a hobbyist store, but it would have been a small chain. Perhaps one radio shack store for a city of million. The way it was now, there is a radio shack at nearly every grocery store, shopping strip, and mall.
Well, for now after two months of ownership, I haven't seen any factory updates yet. To me it wouldn't be a big issue to keep rooting the device only every now and then. In fact, I am thinking of sticking with the KitKat when the Samsung Lollipop update appears. The 4.4.2 seems like a stable smooth OS. I'll let the other kids do the testing and update only when Lollipop has a killer feature that I need.
Also, don't forget that the custom ROM itself is a vector for security issues. I am talking about the custom ROMs that are uploaded on android forums by random unknown dudes, as opposed by well established projects, and then dozens of users can't install them fast enough.
Meanwhile, the Android KitKat 4.4.2 as shipped with my new Samsung Tab S 10.5 tablet is a mature, stable, and pretty smooth OS. I do not get the obsession with always chasing the latest version. I hang around XDA forums, and I feel like more than half of people who flash custom ROMs have no clue why they even need them, but it's some kind of badge of honor to get rid of the stock ROM. They complain about "lag" and "bloatware" which are supposedly fixed, yet no one ever cared to explained to me where I can reproduce that lag and why can't they just delete a couple of pre-bundled apps by hand.
Personally, I have run into three issues, two of which I fixed myself after rooting my device, and the third I can live with.
One thing I don't get is if you know your genes carry a decease that can affect your child's health, then why even try to reproduce? Why not drop the notion of having to continue your rotten genetic line, and instead adopt a healthy child? Jeez.
Without doubt, there is now some kind of liberal conspiracy to bring affirmative action into high-tech education and workplace. Now that they have mostly won the same sex marriage battle, it seems like this is now the top item on the agenda, considering we're seeing news articles on this issue nearly every other day, like this is this the top problem hindering our progress towards some kind of a utopian Star Trek society.
The problem with Perl is not just the time to learn it. The biggest problem is that Perl developers believe in TMTOWTDI (There is more than one way to do it) principle. As a result, numerous Perl idioms exist for doing the exact same thing. No matter how much time you spend reading Perl programming books and coding yourself, you keep running into idioms that look slicker and better (or just bizzare) relative to what you know.
Why is this bad? This is a difficulty for big application development projects where there are many developers working on the same code. The more expressive the language is, the harder it is for others to understand each others code. On the other hand, Python's inventor Guido van Rossum goes into great lengths to ensure that Python has one way for expressing a given task, and usually that it is the simplest of all alternatives. The result is a simple and tidy programming language that's easy to learn and understand.
Another problem with Perl is that it looks like an alien language for anyone who is not a unix wizard. At its core, the original idea of Perl was to have ONE language that combines the ideas of Unix shell programming, C, awk, grep, and other unix tools. To a unix wizard Perl makes total sense. To anyone who is not an expert in the unix environment, Perl looks like a gibberish. And even if they take time to learn what it means, they never understand the design decisions behind it without spending a good amount of time with unix and OS X command line tools.
IMHO, the big difference is that Microsoft has been historically focused on the enterprise. Very boring and business-like. User interfaces and usability have been decent since Windows 95, but still took a backseat to Microsoft's enterprise onslaught. The end users could wait because they were effectively captive customers. And once the web and internet went mainstream, Microsoft spent a whole lot of resources on trying to lock customers into closed Microsoft-only technologies (e.g. Java sabotage attempt, C#, IE, etc) instead of thinking what's going to be the next hottest thing. On the other hand, apple was able to see what's going on beyond the traditional desktop and laptop. Perhaps that was the only route Apple could take considering Microsofts dominance in the traditional PC and server market.
Interesting info, but it does not address one big issue. When you root your android device and upload a different ROM, how do you know this ROM doesn't do something malicious? You probably don't. The only way to be sure is to compile everything yourself.
If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer). Authentic ethnic food is far easier and cheaper to find in LA than in Dallas. The same "LA" arguments apply to the Silicon Valley. California cities are a great place for bicyclists, but in Texas bicyclists are being moved down with big ass trucks like they're some sort of terrorists. I can tell you from my personal observations that a small Bay Area city like Berkeley or Oakland, has far more bicycle paths than San Antonio, a Texas city of 1 million and one of the fattest in the nation.
.. simply because the OEM disabled MSE/Defender and instead shipped the PCs with a trial version of Norton or some other commercial suite? At some point those trials expire, and there could be a lot of people who neither bought the full version nor enabled MSE/Defender.
A little correction. In the last few years, Alpha hardware wasn't being updated, but nobody was beating Alpha when it was alive and developed. Once Compaq bought DEC, they simply let Alpha die on the vine. Compaq, a very x86-centric company, had not interest in proprietary Unix/RISC solution. They apparently bought DEC simply for the DEC customer's contact book.
While I normally prefer MacOS X to Linux, MacOS X 10.4 was the last MacOS X version that was officially supported on my dual-USB G3 iBook. I didn't mind it because 10.4 is still a nice OS, but some time later, like 10 years ago, I realized that getting the latest software, such as Octave, we getting increasingly hard for this OS. Finally, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.6.28 was the last web browser supported on OS X 10.4 a few years back. At that point, I was left no choice but to install Debian.
I disagree about BB. People who are not nerds continue to shop at Best Buy. Best Buy will not price match Amazon and Newegg, so the argument about their prices not competitive is kind of moot. It's also quite reassuring for many people to see and inspect such big household items like washing machine, TV, or refrigerator before buying one.
They could have "gone back to their roots" by dumping all the common electronics that you can get anywhere and addressing the do-it-yourselfers by hopping on the robotics/Arduino bandwagons.
They could, but that would seriously downsize the scale of their operations. For example, in San Antonio, a city of +1 million, they have near a couple of dozen stores. There is not enough enough demand for DIY or hands on projects to keep all those stores open. They could afford to run at most one or two at best.
Slashdot Mirror
OnePlus One is significant because it is now the go-to unlocked smartphone for the geeks. The OS story is mildly interesting. Another Android mod released...
I am not quite sure what you're talking about. The tracks and their skylines are beautiful, and there is always some close, often wheel to wheel, racing for the lead right until the end. The drivers are very accomplished open wheel racers. You can't compare them to the F1 top five or so, but overall they're just as good or better than a median F1 racers. In fact, many of them had a considerable amount of F1 seat time, either as a race or test driver.
And I am sorry, and I personally don't know the product is crap because of blah blah blah. Sounds like you have created a strawman argument to defend your elitist viewpoint here.
That's totally fine. You should realize that among the racing fans there are far more fans of pure racing than the nerds. This is why Formula 1 is far FAR more more popular than WEC will ever be, even though arguably WEC is more advanced tech-wise.
And so as a fan if racing, rather of the technological dick waving, I see a lot of potential in FE racing. The skylines are beautiful, the racers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, many with quite a bit of time in Formula 1 and GP2 seats, and there is always some good competition and wheel to wheel racing up to the end of race. The races are about one hour short which is perfect for our world of living a busy life and having a short attention span.
Clearly, you haven't watched any of Formula E races and in fact you have a very superficial understanding of F1 or other motorsports.
In the FE races I have seen so far, the skylines are beautiful, the drivers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, the cars go fast, and there was plenty of close wheel racing in the first five races so far. What else do you want?
On a really good year of Formula 1 racing, F1 may be more fun to watch than the first season of FE. But every other season, F1 is a major snooze fest that only die hard fans will watch. Case in point, the five years of Schumacher's continuous domination, and then four years of continuous RedBull Vettel domination, and specially years 2011 and 2013.
... , because the language has so many features that nobody but language experts understand all of them.
And I think that's fine. C++ is not an every day go-to programming language. Its use should be reserved for writing heavyweight applications (like the desktop environments, productivity apps, etc), servers, and numerical code. Considering the complexity of a typical c++ app codebase as well as the language itself, only the experts should touch it.
There are a lot of people who are still undecided, the swing voters. I think the use of private email will come up right in the middle of election campaign again.
and with $60 HDMI cables.
Yep. That's what I was talking about. "Linux" is an unwieldy mess of various "metoo" distributions, "metoo" desktop environments, unstable and always changing APIs (starting down at the kernel, whose developers refuse to support a stable API for binary drivers all the way to desktop APIs who break all APIs with each major release), etc. Why would a mainstream desktop user want to track this mess? Nothing has really changed in the Linux world since the 90s. It's a great OS for the tinkerers and tweakers. I you're one of them, just shut up and enjoy this great OS instead of trying to show it down the throats of the mainstream. It never worked and will never work.
To make this work, some big company, like google or Intel, would have to throw its weight behind this idea (basically, like what happened with Android).
I came to this conclusion back in the year 1999 or so, when I saw the emergence of two major GUI systems for Linux, Gnome and KDE. Since then, the Linux desktop was an always changing hydra consisting of numerous GUIs, fast changing APIs, etc. Linux distributions fill pretty nice the nice of a power desktop user's OS. The kinds you run into academia, engineering, etc. But I don't see how it could become a mainstream OS. The only way for Linux distro to become mainstream is to have some kind of benevolent dictator in the form of a large company (like google) to create a working GUI and make all hardware vendors to ship it (e.g. Android).
They could have survived as a hobbyist store, but it would have been a small chain. Perhaps one radio shack store for a city of million. The way it was now, there is a radio shack at nearly every grocery store, shopping strip, and mall.
Well, for now after two months of ownership, I haven't seen any factory updates yet. To me it wouldn't be a big issue to keep rooting the device only every now and then. In fact, I am thinking of sticking with the KitKat when the Samsung Lollipop update appears. The 4.4.2 seems like a stable smooth OS. I'll let the other kids do the testing and update only when Lollipop has a killer feature that I need.
Also, don't forget that the custom ROM itself is a vector for security issues. I am talking about the custom ROMs that are uploaded on android forums by random unknown dudes, as opposed by well established projects, and then dozens of users can't install them fast enough.
Meanwhile, the Android KitKat 4.4.2 as shipped with my new Samsung Tab S 10.5 tablet is a mature, stable, and pretty smooth OS. I do not get the obsession with always chasing the latest version. I hang around XDA forums, and I feel like more than half of people who flash custom ROMs have no clue why they even need them, but it's some kind of badge of honor to get rid of the stock ROM. They complain about "lag" and "bloatware" which are supposedly fixed, yet no one ever cared to explained to me where I can reproduce that lag and why can't they just delete a couple of pre-bundled apps by hand.
Personally, I have run into three issues, two of which I fixed myself after rooting my device, and the third I can live with.
One thing I don't get is if you know your genes carry a decease that can affect your child's health, then why even try to reproduce? Why not drop the notion of having to continue your rotten genetic line, and instead adopt a healthy child? Jeez.
Without doubt, there is now some kind of liberal conspiracy to bring affirmative action into high-tech education and workplace. Now that they have mostly won the same sex marriage battle, it seems like this is now the top item on the agenda, considering we're seeing news articles on this issue nearly every other day, like this is this the top problem hindering our progress towards some kind of a utopian Star Trek society.
The problem with Perl is not just the time to learn it. The biggest problem is that Perl developers believe in TMTOWTDI (There is more than one way to do it) principle. As a result, numerous Perl idioms exist for doing the exact same thing. No matter how much time you spend reading Perl programming books and coding yourself, you keep running into idioms that look slicker and better (or just bizzare) relative to what you know.
Why is this bad? This is a difficulty for big application development projects where there are many developers working on the same code. The more expressive the language is, the harder it is for others to understand each others code. On the other hand, Python's inventor Guido van Rossum goes into great lengths to ensure that Python has one way for expressing a given task, and usually that it is the simplest of all alternatives. The result is a simple and tidy programming language that's easy to learn and understand.
Another problem with Perl is that it looks like an alien language for anyone who is not a unix wizard. At its core, the original idea of Perl was to have ONE language that combines the ideas of Unix shell programming, C, awk, grep, and other unix tools. To a unix wizard Perl makes total sense. To anyone who is not an expert in the unix environment, Perl looks like a gibberish. And even if they take time to learn what it means, they never understand the design decisions behind it without spending a good amount of time with unix and OS X command line tools.
IMHO, the big difference is that Microsoft has been historically focused on the enterprise. Very boring and business-like. User interfaces and usability have been decent since Windows 95, but still took a backseat to Microsoft's enterprise onslaught. The end users could wait because they were effectively captive customers. And once the web and internet went mainstream, Microsoft spent a whole lot of resources on trying to lock customers into closed Microsoft-only technologies (e.g. Java sabotage attempt, C#, IE, etc) instead of thinking what's going to be the next hottest thing. On the other hand, apple was able to see what's going on beyond the traditional desktop and laptop. Perhaps that was the only route Apple could take considering Microsofts dominance in the traditional PC and server market.
Interesting info, but it does not address one big issue. When you root your android device and upload a different ROM, how do you know this ROM doesn't do something malicious? You probably don't. The only way to be sure is to compile everything yourself.
Nonsense. Closed? Yes, for obvious reasons. Insecure by design? Why would any vendor want to do that?
If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer). Authentic ethnic food is far easier and cheaper to find in LA than in Dallas. The same "LA" arguments apply to the Silicon Valley. California cities are a great place for bicyclists, but in Texas bicyclists are being moved down with big ass trucks like they're some sort of terrorists. I can tell you from my personal observations that a small Bay Area city like Berkeley or Oakland, has far more bicycle paths than San Antonio, a Texas city of 1 million and one of the fattest in the nation.
.. simply because the OEM disabled MSE/Defender and instead shipped the PCs with a trial version of Norton or some other commercial suite? At some point those trials expire, and there could be a lot of people who neither bought the full version nor enabled MSE/Defender.
A little correction. In the last few years, Alpha hardware wasn't being updated, but nobody was beating Alpha when it was alive and developed. Once Compaq bought DEC, they simply let Alpha die on the vine. Compaq, a very x86-centric company, had not interest in proprietary Unix/RISC solution. They apparently bought DEC simply for the DEC customer's contact book.
While I normally prefer MacOS X to Linux, MacOS X 10.4 was the last MacOS X version that was officially supported on my dual-USB G3 iBook. I didn't mind it because 10.4 is still a nice OS, but some time later, like 10 years ago, I realized that getting the latest software, such as Octave, we getting increasingly hard for this OS. Finally, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.6.28 was the last web browser supported on OS X 10.4 a few years back. At that point, I was left no choice but to install Debian.
I disagree about BB. People who are not nerds continue to shop at Best Buy. Best Buy will not price match Amazon and Newegg, so the argument about their prices not competitive is kind of moot. It's also quite reassuring for many people to see and inspect such big household items like washing machine, TV, or refrigerator before buying one.
They could have "gone back to their roots" by dumping all the common electronics that you can get anywhere and addressing the do-it-yourselfers by hopping on the robotics/Arduino bandwagons.
They could, but that would seriously downsize the scale of their operations. For example, in San Antonio, a city of +1 million, they have near a couple of dozen stores. There is not enough enough demand for DIY or hands on projects to keep all those stores open. They could afford to run at most one or two at best.