I agree that there is simply too much "crap" in the Android markets all over. The amount of good, quality, useful stuff is a seemingly small ratio of what's out there. But I get by just fine and enjoy a good quality experience. How?
Just like with Windows computers and the like, you simply have to limit what you do with your machines. Limit the resource consumption. Limit the amount of apps you run. Limit tweaks and [animated] wallpapers and all that junk. Do the things which are useful and stop trying to entertain yourself with a new toy every 10 minutes. I take advantage of the fact that people out there are dumb enough to try every app available. I get to read reviews and comments to assist in the choices I make. Good for me, bad for them when things don't work out.
Maturity is required. The market of available crap is not to blame for consumer behavior. (This statement is in sharp contrast to my position on the food we have available to us in the US... the market *IS* to blame and especially when they fight consumer choice and knowledge by preventing information from being available to consumers so they can make their own decisions.) The users are making all the choices... and they always will.
Make good, informed choices. Give favor to software makers with good reputations. It's not that hard.
Irrelevant. Money spent on assaullting other countries is money wasted. It's worse than wasted, it has endangered the people of the US and will have ultimately caused the US's collapse.
It is widely accepted that the people of the US are unable to consume more than two or three news stories at a time. At the moment, at least one or two of those slots are actively occupied by celebrity fluff crap. And what we have in attention limits is completely overshadowed by the lack of comprehension of what is going on in any of these issues and what they actually mean. Issues such as religious and racial tensions not only in the US, but around the world are tuned out while we keep chanting to ourselves "I'm not racist! I'm good! I have a black friend!! See?" And we're being swallowed up by our own debt -- debt largely caused by excessive defense spending... worse, untraceable defense spending as stories of missing millions, billiions and maybe even trillions have been told and few people acknowledge as relevant. And we're seriously nearing the end of the US's relevance in the world as China and other nations are very interested in forcing the US out of the center of the world's influence. We've burned every bridge possible with the NSA unbelievably huge global surveillance and the US government's even larger hubris.
We're on the edge of something extremely bad.
And did you catch the latest celebrity twerk video?! OMG!
Oh, I have. Especially with GNOME and GiMP developers. Talk about failure to listen. The whole Linux community watched as XFree86 refused to listen and work with the communities. Eventually X.org was born and very quickly by any measure replaced XFree86 and rendered their stagnant asses irrelevant. GNOME, meanwhile, gets away with it because there's not yet enough original GNOME developers willing to pull away to spin off a fork... yet. In the mean time, we've got MATE and all that. And GiMP? Don't get me started.
Blackberry has something that presently no one else has -- government security approval and systems in place using it.
Other players have earned the approval but none are currently deploying anything which exploits it.
My way lets them continue on doing their blackberry thing without compromising their approval. Wrapping it with Android enable fun and interesting apps.
One of the rarely spoken problems with Blackberry is that it had become stale. Somehow they mistakenly thought "oh hey, these touchscreen phones are what people want! let's make one too!" It wasn't the touchscreen. It was the apps and the user interface. Being able to do so much more with a phone is the big deal... but it also makes a phone into a toy and a huge distraction. Blackberry is a "business device."
That Blackberry is a business device which is well established for its security and other business-centric features is functional, but "old and stale." So what's a 'berry to do? Well, if they were to ask me, I'd tell them to build a blackberry "module" device and stick it into an Android phone. The two devices work together in that the Android provides the UI to the device which then maintains all the Blackberry core business features and the Android device accesses the data through an API. That way, Android apps can be available to keep people interested in their toy while the Blackberry-ness can continue on.
Recently, I have been going over distinctions between western/American and Japanese cultures. It has been widely accepted that Japanese cultures do not require leaders as much as western/American cultures. When and where things are established and routine, accepted and understood, the Japanese excel in ways that make western/Americans a bit jealous and often awed. On the other hand, crisis management is best handled by smaller numbers and individual thinkers who can collectively see more because they all see things differently.
There are other aspects as well and among these are in how errors, mistakes and anomalies are perceived and handled. When and where the first response is denial, it is an early sign of delayed problem resolution. In a crisis, delays in problem resolution are sometimes deadly. I believe we are seeing this at play now.
I once, in a committee with both Japanese and American members, pointed out that Columbus Day essentially celebrates a mistake of navigation and of understanding the world. The goal was to reach India. Columbus ended up somewhere else. We literally celebrate that and name things after this man. (The truth behind myth and legend is for another discussion and does not change the general truths, myths and legends the holiday actually celebrates in the hearts and minds of the people celebrating.) I pointed out that Americans, at times, celebrate mistakes. This is something the Japanese simply cannot do. The room went silent for a moment. Mistakes are not to be discussed, let alone acknowledged, in Japanese society.
I could go on and on about my experiences in this area, but each approach has its merit and each approach has led each culture into extremely successful growth and development in the world. After all, Japan and America (by which I mean the USA obviously) are highly developed and sophisicated world powers. To simplify and say one approach is wrong while another is right is ridiculous. Japan's way is "mastery" but it takes lifetimes and usually multiple lifetimes to achieve and maintain mastery of any given thing. America's way relies on talents, aptitudes and abilities of individuals to achieve great things. Which is better? We're both here at the same time after all.
The Nobel Prize is reserved for extraordinary people who have accomplished something extraordinary and/or highly significant. The award, if memory serves, was based on what? Intentions? I'm not clear on which intentions, but I am quite sure the long list of promises broken continues.
I am no fan of republicans. It's all crap to me. Please do not presume this is about flags and teams and "who wins or loses." Nothing either of them do benefits me.
So that they can choose when their hardware becomes obsolete.
One of the biggest unspoken threats of Linux is the added longevity hardware picks up. People can use much older hardware because Linux has a much more broad range of support for hardware than any one version of Windows. Why is that? You could argue that supporting device X under all versions of Windows is expensive or some crap like that. But at the end of the day, Linux does this because it's just there... in the kernel source somewhere. But when hardware makers want to push new high-end devices, they sometimes encourage upgrades by disabling features, decreasing performance and all manner of dirty tricks.
If people were wondering why AMD and NVidia have been holding back so hard on their Linux support, I think this is a much more plausible reason than "we outsourced development of the drivers and they patented and/or copyrighted stuff."
It was practically designed by the copyright industry so that they can control everything. I mean they have just about ruined the spec preventing it from being useful. Why does it need an encrypted signal? It kind of ticks me off. I recall troubleshooting and actually putting my amp system into the shop TWICE at the manufacturer's suggestion because they didn't recognize (or admit) that the problem I was experiencing was all about HDMI. (And to think all I wanted to do was play a video game through my amp and to the TV... what copyright interest is there in that?!)
One example of such is flight, I suppose. But we haven't replicated birds as much as we have wanted to. Instead, we've got jets and helicopters. We took what we wanted and went "machine" instead of animal emulation. (Yes, I have seen some impressive flying bird models, but they typically only emulate the flight/flapping part, not so much the 'art' of flight exhibited by birds... the when to coast/glide, when and in what way to flap and all that... and of course landing.)
I think it would be nice to be able to make a human compatible brain machine which could receive a copy of a person's brain functions and consciousness. I couldn't imagine actually uploading my mind to a machine, but my copy wouldn't know if it was an extremely good copy would it? He'd probably think "holy crap, I'm disembodied!!" Then maybe "wow... look at the size of my hard drive!! someone needs to fsck that thing!"
Well, the thing is keeping the US dollar the international fiat currency. If the dollar fails, the "world banks" would unite and create a world currency. Then we'd have more of the same crap because they never actually learn their lessons.
As far as "no one else was responsible in any way" goes? Well I suppose it's about who you ask. Turns out, there was a systematic activity whereby the largest banks in the world and the governments which regulate them were convinced to allow additional leveraging of things that shouldn't have been leveraged. (hint: it's the stuff that led to the collapse and bank failures and bailouts... and seriously, who could ever think that commoditizing bad/risky debt was a good idea?!) Just about all the banks and nations were persuaded to go that route... some took more work than others but eventually through whatever means, they were convinced... all except Brazil. And wouldn't you know it but Brazil didn't suffer the way the rest of the world has been? Sure, there has been some effect there, but not quite like EU countries and the like. And why?? Doesn't have to be said. But sure, you could make the argument that "everyone got stupid at once" and the scenario I describe kinda shows that. But the way I see it, certain powers made it happen and caused/directed others to follow suit. I can't say that it was 'conspiracy' even though that word is no longer a word that means "go away, you're a nut-case" but it can be shown that those things happened even if the 'why' is speculative.
Human brains, and indeed all animal brains, work as a noisy signal device. It is the aggregation of the signals which come together to form an action, process input, formulate a response, etc, and so on. The secret to the low power use in the brain (human brains still use a lot of power, but not as much as a PC) is in the way the pathways work along side each other, affecting each other and milling about in the process of doing things like thinking or writing a comment on slashdot. (Note, the two are demonstrably not the same thing!)
So I have to wonder -- why a human (animal) brain? Do we think that by creating the framework for human compatible brain activity that a human mind will emerge? Do we think that we can upload a human mind into a human brain compatible device? Is the the low power consumption aspects of the human (animal) brain which is the attraction?
Humans make mistakes -- lots of them. To make an artificial human brain would seem to me one which would be expected to make mistakes.... lots of them. So why?
THIS is what I believe is the US's plan to remain relevant in the coming economic collapse. As the rest of the world attempts to "route around" the damage caused by the US, the US's energy independence and abundance will make the US into an attractive exporter to control and keep the price of energy lower. At the end of the day, it's energy that runs the world. It is figuratively and literally a "power struggle."
It's a damned show for everyone. They aren't shutting down the things I'd like them to shut down. And they have even gone through the time and expense of shutting down Mt. Vernon... a PRIVATELY OWNED tourist location.
Belief is more powerful than fact. So delivering 100 studies that consistently show that pirates are also customers. They believe it's bad and wrong and that's that.
What's more, piracy is competition. It doesn't matter if people would rather buy than pirate, the price point at which people would begin to decide otherwise is lowered when downloading for free is available somewhere.
Better solution. No benchmark test should be accepted unless the software was written AFTER the release of the hardware being tested. And then, yes, randomize various things including the compiled code.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that there is simply too much "crap" in the Android markets all over. The amount of good, quality, useful stuff is a seemingly small ratio of what's out there. But I get by just fine and enjoy a good quality experience. How?
Just like with Windows computers and the like, you simply have to limit what you do with your machines. Limit the resource consumption. Limit the amount of apps you run. Limit tweaks and [animated] wallpapers and all that junk. Do the things which are useful and stop trying to entertain yourself with a new toy every 10 minutes. I take advantage of the fact that people out there are dumb enough to try every app available. I get to read reviews and comments to assist in the choices I make. Good for me, bad for them when things don't work out.
Maturity is required. The market of available crap is not to blame for consumer behavior. (This statement is in sharp contrast to my position on the food we have available to us in the US... the market *IS* to blame and especially when they fight consumer choice and knowledge by preventing information from being available to consumers so they can make their own decisions.) The users are making all the choices... and they always will.
Make good, informed choices. Give favor to software makers with good reputations. It's not that hard.
Irrelevant. Money spent on assaullting other countries is money wasted. It's worse than wasted, it has endangered the people of the US and will have ultimately caused the US's collapse.
It is widely accepted that the people of the US are unable to consume more than two or three news stories at a time. At the moment, at least one or two of those slots are actively occupied by celebrity fluff crap. And what we have in attention limits is completely overshadowed by the lack of comprehension of what is going on in any of these issues and what they actually mean. Issues such as religious and racial tensions not only in the US, but around the world are tuned out while we keep chanting to ourselves "I'm not racist! I'm good! I have a black friend!! See?" And we're being swallowed up by our own debt -- debt largely caused by excessive defense spending... worse, untraceable defense spending as stories of missing millions, billiions and maybe even trillions have been told and few people acknowledge as relevant. And we're seriously nearing the end of the US's relevance in the world as China and other nations are very interested in forcing the US out of the center of the world's influence. We've burned every bridge possible with the NSA unbelievably huge global surveillance and the US government's even larger hubris.
We're on the edge of something extremely bad.
And did you catch the latest celebrity twerk video?! OMG!
Oh, I have. Especially with GNOME and GiMP developers. Talk about failure to listen. The whole Linux community watched as XFree86 refused to listen and work with the communities. Eventually X.org was born and very quickly by any measure replaced XFree86 and rendered their stagnant asses irrelevant. GNOME, meanwhile, gets away with it because there's not yet enough original GNOME developers willing to pull away to spin off a fork... yet. In the mean time, we've got MATE and all that. And GiMP? Don't get me started.
That is the most insulting demonstration of hubris from Oracle I have seen in a very long time.
Looks like a "walled garden" to me.
It already does it but it doesn't work. So, it doesn't actually do it... it almost sorta tries to do it.
Blackberry has something that presently no one else has -- government security approval and systems in place using it.
Other players have earned the approval but none are currently deploying anything which exploits it.
My way lets them continue on doing their blackberry thing without compromising their approval. Wrapping it with Android enable fun and interesting apps.
One of the rarely spoken problems with Blackberry is that it had become stale. Somehow they mistakenly thought "oh hey, these touchscreen phones are what people want! let's make one too!" It wasn't the touchscreen. It was the apps and the user interface. Being able to do so much more with a phone is the big deal... but it also makes a phone into a toy and a huge distraction. Blackberry is a "business device."
That Blackberry is a business device which is well established for its security and other business-centric features is functional, but "old and stale." So what's a 'berry to do? Well, if they were to ask me, I'd tell them to build a blackberry "module" device and stick it into an Android phone. The two devices work together in that the Android provides the UI to the device which then maintains all the Blackberry core business features and the Android device accesses the data through an API. That way, Android apps can be available to keep people interested in their toy while the Blackberry-ness can continue on.
Yes, there is.
Recently, I have been going over distinctions between western/American and Japanese cultures. It has been widely accepted that Japanese cultures do not require leaders as much as western/American cultures. When and where things are established and routine, accepted and understood, the Japanese excel in ways that make western/Americans a bit jealous and often awed. On the other hand, crisis management is best handled by smaller numbers and individual thinkers who can collectively see more because they all see things differently.
There are other aspects as well and among these are in how errors, mistakes and anomalies are perceived and handled. When and where the first response is denial, it is an early sign of delayed problem resolution. In a crisis, delays in problem resolution are sometimes deadly. I believe we are seeing this at play now.
I once, in a committee with both Japanese and American members, pointed out that Columbus Day essentially celebrates a mistake of navigation and of understanding the world. The goal was to reach India. Columbus ended up somewhere else. We literally celebrate that and name things after this man. (The truth behind myth and legend is for another discussion and does not change the general truths, myths and legends the holiday actually celebrates in the hearts and minds of the people celebrating.) I pointed out that Americans, at times, celebrate mistakes. This is something the Japanese simply cannot do. The room went silent for a moment. Mistakes are not to be discussed, let alone acknowledged, in Japanese society.
I could go on and on about my experiences in this area, but each approach has its merit and each approach has led each culture into extremely successful growth and development in the world. After all, Japan and America (by which I mean the USA obviously) are highly developed and sophisicated world powers. To simplify and say one approach is wrong while another is right is ridiculous. Japan's way is "mastery" but it takes lifetimes and usually multiple lifetimes to achieve and maintain mastery of any given thing. America's way relies on talents, aptitudes and abilities of individuals to achieve great things. Which is better? We're both here at the same time after all.
Odd. It seems Wikipedia is just wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
It shows hardware makers did HDMI but the media industry inserted HDCP.
The Nobel Prize is reserved for extraordinary people who have accomplished something extraordinary and/or highly significant. The award, if memory serves, was based on what? Intentions? I'm not clear on which intentions, but I am quite sure the long list of promises broken continues.
I am no fan of republicans. It's all crap to me. Please do not presume this is about flags and teams and "who wins or loses." Nothing either of them do benefits me.
You know the one he got for being black? He certainly hasn't done anything to promote world peace beyond giving up on the Syria attack.
So that they can choose when their hardware becomes obsolete.
One of the biggest unspoken threats of Linux is the added longevity hardware picks up. People can use much older hardware because Linux has a much more broad range of support for hardware than any one version of Windows. Why is that? You could argue that supporting device X under all versions of Windows is expensive or some crap like that. But at the end of the day, Linux does this because it's just there... in the kernel source somewhere. But when hardware makers want to push new high-end devices, they sometimes encourage upgrades by disabling features, decreasing performance and all manner of dirty tricks.
If people were wondering why AMD and NVidia have been holding back so hard on their Linux support, I think this is a much more plausible reason than "we outsourced development of the drivers and they patented and/or copyrighted stuff."
It was practically designed by the copyright industry so that they can control everything. I mean they have just about ruined the spec preventing it from being useful. Why does it need an encrypted signal? It kind of ticks me off. I recall troubleshooting and actually putting my amp system into the shop TWICE at the manufacturer's suggestion because they didn't recognize (or admit) that the problem I was experiencing was all about HDMI. (And to think all I wanted to do was play a video game through my amp and to the TV... what copyright interest is there in that?!)
Step 5) ???
Step 6) Profit!
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied. Does that fit here? Maybe... in a way I think.
One example of such is flight, I suppose. But we haven't replicated birds as much as we have wanted to. Instead, we've got jets and helicopters. We took what we wanted and went "machine" instead of animal emulation. (Yes, I have seen some impressive flying bird models, but they typically only emulate the flight/flapping part, not so much the 'art' of flight exhibited by birds... the when to coast/glide, when and in what way to flap and all that... and of course landing.)
I think it would be nice to be able to make a human compatible brain machine which could receive a copy of a person's brain functions and consciousness. I couldn't imagine actually uploading my mind to a machine, but my copy wouldn't know if it was an extremely good copy would it? He'd probably think "holy crap, I'm disembodied!!" Then maybe "wow... look at the size of my hard drive!! someone needs to fsck that thing!"
Well, the thing is keeping the US dollar the international fiat currency. If the dollar fails, the "world banks" would unite and create a world currency. Then we'd have more of the same crap because they never actually learn their lessons.
As far as "no one else was responsible in any way" goes? Well I suppose it's about who you ask. Turns out, there was a systematic activity whereby the largest banks in the world and the governments which regulate them were convinced to allow additional leveraging of things that shouldn't have been leveraged. (hint: it's the stuff that led to the collapse and bank failures and bailouts... and seriously, who could ever think that commoditizing bad/risky debt was a good idea?!) Just about all the banks and nations were persuaded to go that route... some took more work than others but eventually through whatever means, they were convinced... all except Brazil. And wouldn't you know it but Brazil didn't suffer the way the rest of the world has been? Sure, there has been some effect there, but not quite like EU countries and the like. And why?? Doesn't have to be said. But sure, you could make the argument that "everyone got stupid at once" and the scenario I describe kinda shows that. But the way I see it, certain powers made it happen and caused/directed others to follow suit. I can't say that it was 'conspiracy' even though that word is no longer a word that means "go away, you're a nut-case" but it can be shown that those things happened even if the 'why' is speculative.
The pork-elephant in the room: Starting and persisting needless war.
It's expensive and had demonstrably made life in the US less safe and the world less safe for US Americans.
Human brains, and indeed all animal brains, work as a noisy signal device. It is the aggregation of the signals which come together to form an action, process input, formulate a response, etc, and so on. The secret to the low power use in the brain (human brains still use a lot of power, but not as much as a PC) is in the way the pathways work along side each other, affecting each other and milling about in the process of doing things like thinking or writing a comment on slashdot. (Note, the two are demonstrably not the same thing!)
So I have to wonder -- why a human (animal) brain? Do we think that by creating the framework for human compatible brain activity that a human mind will emerge? Do we think that we can upload a human mind into a human brain compatible device? Is the the low power consumption aspects of the human (animal) brain which is the attraction?
Humans make mistakes -- lots of them. To make an artificial human brain would seem to me one which would be expected to make mistakes.... lots of them. So why?
THIS is what I believe is the US's plan to remain relevant in the coming economic collapse. As the rest of the world attempts to "route around" the damage caused by the US, the US's energy independence and abundance will make the US into an attractive exporter to control and keep the price of energy lower. At the end of the day, it's energy that runs the world. It is figuratively and literally a "power struggle."
It's a damned show for everyone. They aren't shutting down the things I'd like them to shut down. And they have even gone through the time and expense of shutting down Mt. Vernon... a PRIVATELY OWNED tourist location.
It's a big show and no one is convinced.
Belief is more powerful than fact. So delivering 100 studies that consistently show that pirates are also customers. They believe it's bad and wrong and that's that.
What's more, piracy is competition. It doesn't matter if people would rather buy than pirate, the price point at which people would begin to decide otherwise is lowered when downloading for free is available somewhere.
Better solution. No benchmark test should be accepted unless the software was written AFTER the release of the hardware being tested. And then, yes, randomize various things including the compiled code.