I have to agree (and I'm an Android user, and no fan of Apple). Users want security and total convenience, and while technically the permissions side of Android is fine, the average user just wants their funny talking dog app to run - they don't care to look through the permissions list and wonder why it wants to be able to dial numbers and access all their personal data. Similarly, when Microsoft implemented UAC in Windows, people complained about the intrusive pop-ups and would automatically approve them to make them go away, until they were forced to lower the default setting in Windows 7. But you can bet that if they get malware on their Android phone or Windows PC they'll be blaming Google and Microsoft for not preventing it, rather than themselves for agreeing to its installation.
I don't see how there can be a perfect solution though... either you have freedom and have to take responsibility for these risks (knowing that a lot of people won't), or close off the device to anything that's not officially curated (restrictive and not foolproof either). Given the choice, I'll take - and have taken - the former, but I can appreciate that it's not necessarily ideal for the average user. All I can think of is initially exposing devices to a curated version of the Play Store ala Apple but providing a way to access the unrestricted catalogue if you agree to the increased risk, but that starts to make developing for Android look less attractive and would cost Google more.
This is a valid point, yep. Raising money for, say, developing a game through Kickstarter is fine, because you're just paying for the developers' time in advance rather than retrospectively, and that's what most of the money goes on. But if you're selling something on Kickstarter that has actual unit costs, you'd better be making sure that the price is high enough to cover all your overheads after you take that into account, and $99 is not a lot to be selling this device for considering that they also need to develop the controller, write the software, build a back-end infrastructure, perhaps fund some first-party games to kick start (if you excuse the term) the device, market it etc.
Each new console generation is a major leap over the last, given the years that go by between upgrades, but I wouldn't call them vastly overpowered - each upgrade brings them about up to scratch with the GPU technology of the day. In particular, the vast majority of games on the Xbox 360 and PS3 don't render at 1080p, and sometimes can't sustain 30fps despite this. Developers get more out of the hardware when they can target a specific platform, but they're looking decidedly long in the tooth now.
Having said that, the Ouya isn't even supposed to be released until next year, and it's already not on the fastest SoC in a market that's moving fast. I have a Tegra 3 device myself driving a 1200x800 display, and I'd say that its rendering can be about on-par with current consoles (given that they usually render at 720p at best) as long as things aren't too complex... but the current consoles are years old and past due for replacement. The Ouya is okay for today, but it'll be decidedly shoddy in five years' time, and if they release incremental upgrades you lose the simplicity and hardware-targeting that are the advantages of consoles in the first place.
Re:I'm reminded of the EU referendum in Ireland
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
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· Score: 1
Ah, yes... despite being in favour of voting reform, I was forced to vote No on that referendum due to the fact that I didn't want AV specifically. Of course, my No vote could then be interpreted as a vote against voting reform in general. They were certainly clever there.
Android's nature counts against it where advertising and mind-share come into play, I fear. Apple has a huge marketing budget and a single device to push. Individual manufacturers of Android phones usually have multiple devices to advertise at any one time, and want to drive customers towards their own specific Android phones rather than Android as a platform. Google don't advertise Android much, but even if they did, it's a vague concept to sell to consumers, especially when there are so many customised versions. Samsung has started to develop the sort of recognition and identity with the Galaxy S series that allows them to compete, and they're doing very well out of it.
But, yes, I know what you mean. I've tried to persuade people to look at everything on offer and decide what they like the most; if that's the iPhone, great, but at least consider your options. But Apple's marketing is so successful that they're not going out to get a phone, they're going out to get an iPhone, because that's what you get when you want a smartphone. Credit where credit's due I guess, but I wish people wouldn't swallow it up so wholeheartedly.
I own an original Galaxy S, and I do think it skirted too close to the line in looking like an iPhone 3GS. The chrome trim did it. Both the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S III look distinct from Apple devices to me, though.
But the design points that Apple have tried to push recently: devices which are flat, thin and rectangular and have a large screen? There's no sensible design for a hand-held, touchscreen-controlled device that doesn't meet those criteria. No-one would buy a bulky, square tablet/phone with a small screen and an cluttered appearance, which Apple know perfectly well and so are trying to prevent other manufacturers from competing with them at all.
I'm really getting tired of tech news consisting almost entirely of mobile device manufacturers suing each other over patents for general concepts and design principles. Technology progresses and consumers benefit when ideas and concepts can spread. This isn't the same as, say, drug development, where millions of dollars go into R&D, and that massive investment must be recouped to protect innovation. These are just relatively obvious ideas where the real work is in the implementation, integration and promotion, not in dreaming up a UI concept.
The counter-argument would be that less than £1/year/person is a small price to pay for the international relations and tourism benefits they and their properties bring. That, I suppose, is up for debate.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of criminals weren't very technologically savvy, to be fair. Not that that should mean the authorities have the right to intercept communications without good reason.
The previous Labour government would have done the same - they hurriedly passed the Digital Economy Act in their last days in power, requiring ISPs to cut off users' Internet access if companies accused them of unlawfully accessing copyrighted material. That hasn't actually been done yet, but the authority is in place to do it.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to successfully stand up against these measures on the grounds of censorship - it's all too easy for those in favour of the laws to cast their opponents as thieves and pornographers who want to wreck the economy and corrupt poor innocent children.
Yes... provided that they die prior to reproducing. In the Western world, few people die of disease before they reach reproductive age, what with modern medicine, so there's not a lot of selection pressure exerted there.
I'm really quite sure that this disease is not imaginary - because people and animals fall ill and die because of these conditions, and because cases fall once transmission vectors are removed. People didn't start randomly dissecting cows' brains in the UK because of mass-media fears, it was because of an epidemic of a neurodegenerative disease in herds - they didn't know of BSE before then, and it took several years to appreciate what the problem was. When controls to eradicate infectious animals started, the incidence declined; correspondingly, human zoonoses peaked (after a delay due to the incubation period) and then declined. 176 people have died from definite or probable vCJD in the UK, though there are few new cases now. BSE/vCJD is hardly the only prion disease around either, with scrapie (affecting sheep) also being studied and monitored, and kuru having affected humans who engaged in cannibalistic practices.
It's not a reason to panic, and it's not going to destroy civilisation. After all, it doesn't seem to be very infectious anyway, at least cross-species. But it's not imaginary.
Naturally my analogy was an exaggeration, and like most analogies has its flaws. But I do understand stem cells; I'm currently doing a PhD in biology that relates to stem cells and differentiation. I'm certainly aware of the potential that stem cell-based therapies have, but they ought to be done in a controlled and experimentally-validated manner, not just injecting some cells into humans and hoping they help. They might be beneficial - this needs to be properly studied - but they might do nothing, or even risk causing other pathologies or even cancer.
This gives some thoughts on the subject, and this is a recent review article on the risks associated with various therapies.
A lot of "we injected him with stem cells!" is rather questionable, something akin to throwing some parts into a car's engine bay if it stops working. Sure, the parts might potentially be useful, but they're not necessarily the right ones, nor will they necessarily end up in the right places. There's certainly potential for future stem-cell based therapies, but most things that you can get done in clinics today are of dubious benefit.
It's never been a codified right in the vein of the US First Amendment, other than through the European Convention on Human Rights - which allows for plenty of restrictions, including those "for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, [or] for the protection of the reputation or rights of others", all of which could be argued to be related to "inciting racial hatred".
I have a BA in biology, and am currently working on my PhD, also in biology. None of my work has anything directly to do with computers. However, as much as I enjoyed learning about science, I've come to understand during my PhD that research is not something which I want to spend the rest of my life doing: I'm not driven sufficiently by it. Instead, I've looked to what I do as a hobby, and am applying for programming jobs.
I have no academic qualifications relating to computers at all - I was massively turned off by "IT" lessons at school, which were in fact "Microsoft Office" lessons - but I do have some summer work experience setting up a database and doing software testing, and I've worked on various small personal projects over the years.
I've been pleasantly surprised at how open companies have been to the prospect of employing me as a programmer, and both companies I've applied to so far have interviewed me. I didn't quite fit with the first company, who seemed rather geared towards mathematicians (one of their earlier hires had a psychology PhD though), but things are going well with the second and I'm very hopeful.
Admittedly, I do have a harder-science background than you (not that biology is really up there with physics/chemistry/maths/engineering in most people's perception) and a PhD-in-progress to catch the eye. But I'd get your CV out there, make sure you mention the languages you know and your open source experience, and do some reading around fundamental CS concepts like computational complexity - you might be surprised. Having practical experience with real-world projects is arguably just as or more valuable as having formal education but never having used it outside of assignments, and being self-taught shows a deep level of interest - you're doing it because you enjoy it, rather than because you saw a paycheck in it. You need to find the right people to see that side, of course; I would in particular see if there are any companies specifically advertising jobs for graduates, since they won't be expecting years of industry experience in the first place.
You're never going to get, working as an engineer at a small company, the kind of pay that you'd get as a middle manager at a large corporation.
Nope. Unfortunately, you're not going to get the kind of pay you'll get in management in any job where you do the practical work. If that's what you enjoy doing, then you have to accept the trade-off of lower pay for greater job satisfaction/enjoyment. I'd like it to be different, but that's the reality.
I'd say that your best bet is probably to be in a company that's focused around your job role rather than being an ancillary part of some other corporation. If you're a programmer, a software company is more likely to understand the value that you add than a grocery store? I could well be wrong about that, though.
Even when I used a Windows Mobile phone, I barely ever used Marketplace. It seemed to be rather empty, and was too little, too late for app distribution on that platform.
It probably is, which probably means that the results aren't statistically significantly different. This is such a common problem: in science, if you attempt to present data that doesn't have statistical significance (i.e. it's unlikely that any difference that you see is due to chance), no-one will believe you. But in the media, tiny differences in means observed from small sample sets are regularly presented as real differences, when in all likelihood it's all down to sampling error. (How accurately do people report the amount of sleep they get, anyway?)
We're never going to see error bars and p-values in reviews and newspaper articles, though, so you just have to take stories like this with a heavy dose of salt.
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I have to agree (and I'm an Android user, and no fan of Apple). Users want security and total convenience, and while technically the permissions side of Android is fine, the average user just wants their funny talking dog app to run - they don't care to look through the permissions list and wonder why it wants to be able to dial numbers and access all their personal data. Similarly, when Microsoft implemented UAC in Windows, people complained about the intrusive pop-ups and would automatically approve them to make them go away, until they were forced to lower the default setting in Windows 7. But you can bet that if they get malware on their Android phone or Windows PC they'll be blaming Google and Microsoft for not preventing it, rather than themselves for agreeing to its installation.
I don't see how there can be a perfect solution though... either you have freedom and have to take responsibility for these risks (knowing that a lot of people won't), or close off the device to anything that's not officially curated (restrictive and not foolproof either). Given the choice, I'll take - and have taken - the former, but I can appreciate that it's not necessarily ideal for the average user. All I can think of is initially exposing devices to a curated version of the Play Store ala Apple but providing a way to access the unrestricted catalogue if you agree to the increased risk, but that starts to make developing for Android look less attractive and would cost Google more.
This is a valid point, yep. Raising money for, say, developing a game through Kickstarter is fine, because you're just paying for the developers' time in advance rather than retrospectively, and that's what most of the money goes on. But if you're selling something on Kickstarter that has actual unit costs, you'd better be making sure that the price is high enough to cover all your overheads after you take that into account, and $99 is not a lot to be selling this device for considering that they also need to develop the controller, write the software, build a back-end infrastructure, perhaps fund some first-party games to kick start (if you excuse the term) the device, market it etc.
Each new console generation is a major leap over the last, given the years that go by between upgrades, but I wouldn't call them vastly overpowered - each upgrade brings them about up to scratch with the GPU technology of the day. In particular, the vast majority of games on the Xbox 360 and PS3 don't render at 1080p, and sometimes can't sustain 30fps despite this. Developers get more out of the hardware when they can target a specific platform, but they're looking decidedly long in the tooth now.
Having said that, the Ouya isn't even supposed to be released until next year, and it's already not on the fastest SoC in a market that's moving fast. I have a Tegra 3 device myself driving a 1200x800 display, and I'd say that its rendering can be about on-par with current consoles (given that they usually render at 720p at best) as long as things aren't too complex... but the current consoles are years old and past due for replacement. The Ouya is okay for today, but it'll be decidedly shoddy in five years' time, and if they release incremental upgrades you lose the simplicity and hardware-targeting that are the advantages of consoles in the first place.
Ah, yes... despite being in favour of voting reform, I was forced to vote No on that referendum due to the fact that I didn't want AV specifically. Of course, my No vote could then be interpreted as a vote against voting reform in general. They were certainly clever there.
Android's nature counts against it where advertising and mind-share come into play, I fear. Apple has a huge marketing budget and a single device to push. Individual manufacturers of Android phones usually have multiple devices to advertise at any one time, and want to drive customers towards their own specific Android phones rather than Android as a platform. Google don't advertise Android much, but even if they did, it's a vague concept to sell to consumers, especially when there are so many customised versions. Samsung has started to develop the sort of recognition and identity with the Galaxy S series that allows them to compete, and they're doing very well out of it.
But, yes, I know what you mean. I've tried to persuade people to look at everything on offer and decide what they like the most; if that's the iPhone, great, but at least consider your options. But Apple's marketing is so successful that they're not going out to get a phone, they're going out to get an iPhone, because that's what you get when you want a smartphone. Credit where credit's due I guess, but I wish people wouldn't swallow it up so wholeheartedly.
Apple were first to commercialise them, but mouse-driven graphical user interfaces were first seen on the Xerox Alto.
I own an original Galaxy S, and I do think it skirted too close to the line in looking like an iPhone 3GS. The chrome trim did it. Both the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S III look distinct from Apple devices to me, though.
But the design points that Apple have tried to push recently: devices which are flat, thin and rectangular and have a large screen? There's no sensible design for a hand-held, touchscreen-controlled device that doesn't meet those criteria. No-one would buy a bulky, square tablet/phone with a small screen and an cluttered appearance, which Apple know perfectly well and so are trying to prevent other manufacturers from competing with them at all.
I'm really getting tired of tech news consisting almost entirely of mobile device manufacturers suing each other over patents for general concepts and design principles. Technology progresses and consumers benefit when ideas and concepts can spread. This isn't the same as, say, drug development, where millions of dollars go into R&D, and that massive investment must be recouped to protect innovation. These are just relatively obvious ideas where the real work is in the implementation, integration and promotion, not in dreaming up a UI concept.
Maybe this would be a good place to mention the EFF's new campaign to reform software patents?
The counter-argument would be that less than £1/year/person is a small price to pay for the international relations and tourism benefits they and their properties bring. That, I suppose, is up for debate.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of criminals weren't very technologically savvy, to be fair. Not that that should mean the authorities have the right to intercept communications without good reason.
The previous Labour government would have done the same - they hurriedly passed the Digital Economy Act in their last days in power, requiring ISPs to cut off users' Internet access if companies accused them of unlawfully accessing copyrighted material. That hasn't actually been done yet, but the authority is in place to do it.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to successfully stand up against these measures on the grounds of censorship - it's all too easy for those in favour of the laws to cast their opponents as thieves and pornographers who want to wreck the economy and corrupt poor innocent children.
Yes... provided that they die prior to reproducing. In the Western world, few people die of disease before they reach reproductive age, what with modern medicine, so there's not a lot of selection pressure exerted there.
Automobile accidents, on the other hand...
I'm really quite sure that this disease is not imaginary - because people and animals fall ill and die because of these conditions, and because cases fall once transmission vectors are removed. People didn't start randomly dissecting cows' brains in the UK because of mass-media fears, it was because of an epidemic of a neurodegenerative disease in herds - they didn't know of BSE before then, and it took several years to appreciate what the problem was. When controls to eradicate infectious animals started, the incidence declined; correspondingly, human zoonoses peaked (after a delay due to the incubation period) and then declined. 176 people have died from definite or probable vCJD in the UK, though there are few new cases now. BSE/vCJD is hardly the only prion disease around either, with scrapie (affecting sheep) also being studied and monitored, and kuru having affected humans who engaged in cannibalistic practices.
It's not a reason to panic, and it's not going to destroy civilisation. After all, it doesn't seem to be very infectious anyway, at least cross-species. But it's not imaginary.
Yes, they are. And why does that invalidate anything the parent said?
Just what I was thinking... it's ridiculous to write off entire populations for an incredibly remote risk that has all but passed.
Not that anyone is willing to accept me as a blood donor anyway...
Naturally my analogy was an exaggeration, and like most analogies has its flaws. But I do understand stem cells; I'm currently doing a PhD in biology that relates to stem cells and differentiation. I'm certainly aware of the potential that stem cell-based therapies have, but they ought to be done in a controlled and experimentally-validated manner, not just injecting some cells into humans and hoping they help. They might be beneficial - this needs to be properly studied - but they might do nothing, or even risk causing other pathologies or even cancer.
This gives some thoughts on the subject, and this is a recent review article on the risks associated with various therapies.
A lot of "we injected him with stem cells!" is rather questionable, something akin to throwing some parts into a car's engine bay if it stops working. Sure, the parts might potentially be useful, but they're not necessarily the right ones, nor will they necessarily end up in the right places. There's certainly potential for future stem-cell based therapies, but most things that you can get done in clinics today are of dubious benefit.
Agreed. Demonstrating the dangers of the Internet isn't helpful at all, and is more likely to steel them against this threat.
It's never been a codified right in the vein of the US First Amendment, other than through the European Convention on Human Rights - which allows for plenty of restrictions, including those "for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, [or] for the protection of the reputation or rights of others", all of which could be argued to be related to "inciting racial hatred".
I have a BA in biology, and am currently working on my PhD, also in biology. None of my work has anything directly to do with computers. However, as much as I enjoyed learning about science, I've come to understand during my PhD that research is not something which I want to spend the rest of my life doing: I'm not driven sufficiently by it. Instead, I've looked to what I do as a hobby, and am applying for programming jobs.
I have no academic qualifications relating to computers at all - I was massively turned off by "IT" lessons at school, which were in fact "Microsoft Office" lessons - but I do have some summer work experience setting up a database and doing software testing, and I've worked on various small personal projects over the years.
I've been pleasantly surprised at how open companies have been to the prospect of employing me as a programmer, and both companies I've applied to so far have interviewed me. I didn't quite fit with the first company, who seemed rather geared towards mathematicians (one of their earlier hires had a psychology PhD though), but things are going well with the second and I'm very hopeful.
Admittedly, I do have a harder-science background than you (not that biology is really up there with physics/chemistry/maths/engineering in most people's perception) and a PhD-in-progress to catch the eye. But I'd get your CV out there, make sure you mention the languages you know and your open source experience, and do some reading around fundamental CS concepts like computational complexity - you might be surprised. Having practical experience with real-world projects is arguably just as or more valuable as having formal education but never having used it outside of assignments, and being self-taught shows a deep level of interest - you're doing it because you enjoy it, rather than because you saw a paycheck in it. You need to find the right people to see that side, of course; I would in particular see if there are any companies specifically advertising jobs for graduates, since they won't be expecting years of industry experience in the first place.
You're never going to get, working as an engineer at a small company, the kind of pay that you'd get as a middle manager at a large corporation.
Nope. Unfortunately, you're not going to get the kind of pay you'll get in management in any job where you do the practical work. If that's what you enjoy doing, then you have to accept the trade-off of lower pay for greater job satisfaction/enjoyment. I'd like it to be different, but that's the reality.
I'd say that your best bet is probably to be in a company that's focused around your job role rather than being an ancillary part of some other corporation. If you're a programmer, a software company is more likely to understand the value that you add than a grocery store? I could well be wrong about that, though.
Even when I used a Windows Mobile phone, I barely ever used Marketplace. It seemed to be rather empty, and was too little, too late for app distribution on that platform.
the next step will be to centralize processing power and "stream" the video output to our dumb terminals..
So, OnLive then?
It probably is, which probably means that the results aren't statistically significantly different. This is such a common problem: in science, if you attempt to present data that doesn't have statistical significance (i.e. it's unlikely that any difference that you see is due to chance), no-one will believe you. But in the media, tiny differences in means observed from small sample sets are regularly presented as real differences, when in all likelihood it's all down to sampling error. (How accurately do people report the amount of sleep they get, anyway?)
We're never going to see error bars and p-values in reviews and newspaper articles, though, so you just have to take stories like this with a heavy dose of salt.
Photoshop Touch has already been out for a few months on Android tablets actually, and the iPad version is "as close to identical to the Android version as is possible, given the platform differences". So that's no reason to get an iPad over an Android tablet.