We thought we had things locked down nice and tight the first time through. Then we had a tech sit in on a class using "Exam Mode". Students had broken out and were on Facebook within 2 minutes of booting the system! Was quite the eye-opener!
Which is why it went through so many iterations before they used it for the first e-exam.:)
And we watch the labs periodically to see if anyone has found any news ways around our blocks, just to make sure.:)
That's what we do. All our Linux stations boot off the network and use NFS mounts for everything. For government exams, teachers reboot the stations into "Exam Mode" which disables everything possible, launches a bare-bones X11 session with Firefox as the "WM", with all settings locked in, including an add-on that let's you specify a list of sites that are accessible, blocking access to everything else.
Took a few iterations to get the configuration locked down completely, but there's really no better way to find the holes than watch a class of students try to break it.:)
It's not bullet-proof, but we've made it hard enough that it's very obvious when a student is trying to break out of the box that anyone watching the lab will notice.:)
If you can't change the OS config, you can't lock it down.
They aren't bulkier, unless you compare them to the uber-excessively-unwieldy-thin phones like the Droid Razr. Any phone that's under 10 mm thick is unwieldy and uncomfortable to hold unless you have childish/girlish hands. Sure, it looks pretty... but they are a pain to use.
An Xperia Pro is actually thinner than an iPhone 4/4S. A Droid 3 is actually thinner. The HTC sliders are the same thickness as an iPhone 4/4S.
Rather than worrying about who has the slimmest dick...er...phone, it would be nice if phone manufacturers worried about "comfort", "fit in the hand", and "extra room for more battery".
Keyboard phones are not "bulky". The Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro is the same thickness as an iPhone 4/4S. The Droid 3 is thinner. Others are the same thickness. Unless you are comparing them to uber-thin (and unwieldy) phones like the Droid Razr, keyboard phones are no less "bulky" than non-keyboard phones.
The giant screened (4"+) non-keyboard phones are a lot more unwieldy than a smaller-screened (3.5-4.0") keyboard phone, due to the width of the screen. Thickness is actually a good thing in a phone, as you have something to grab onto and hold. A super-thin, wide phone (like the Galaxy S, Galaxy Nexus, Droid Razr, etc) are actually harder to hold *because of* their thinness.
As for giant phones being hard to talk on, it's due to the awkwardness of holding onto a wafer-thin, extra wide case. They are not comfortable to hold, nor easy to hold.
As for "typing a lot" on a phone, the main selling features of a smartphone are SMS, IM, E-mail... all things you have to type. And then the apps. How do you expect to use an SSH client, an IM client, an e-mail app, when half the screen is taken up by the onscreen keyboard, a quarter of the screen taken up by the previous message, and only a quarter of the screen left for your message?
I don't want a tablet, as they don't fit in my pocket. I want a smartphone that's easy to type on, since it's used for... typing e-mail, SMS, IM messages.
I don't want a bluetooth keyboard, as that's just another thing to lose and have to carry around.
I don't want a crappy onscreen keyboard with no tactile feedback, where my fingers obscure the keys, where keypresses are picked up by the wrong keys due to the size of my fingertips, where the keyboard takes up half (or more) of the screen.
I want a decent sized screen (3.5-4"), with a hardware keyboard. Thankfully, there are some manufacturers who understand this, and make keyboards versions available.
You don't really need to keep the physical form factor the same in order to create a viable accessories ecosystem. You just need to keep the ports in the same location.
The reason the Apple accessories market is so huge is that there's only 1 connector you need to worry about, it's always located in the same location, it's always the same size, etc.
We don't need a "dock" connector on Android, as we already have mini-HDMI and micro-USB which covers everything a "dock" connector would: video, audio, data, power, etc. Shoot, you could even put the headphone jack next to them if you want to support analog audio.
What's missing is a standardised location (put them both side-by-side) and distance between the ports. Every phone manufacturer puts them in different places, and it's different even between phone models.
If they would standardise this (even if only within a single manufacturer, across all their phone models), accessories makers would appear overnight.
While Shaw cable Internet prices may be higher than DSL (Telus usually), their download speeds and data caps are also much, much, much higher.
Shaw DOCSCIS 2.0 connections top out at 25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up, with 400 GB download per month.
Shaw DOCSIS 3.0 connections starts at 50 Mbps down, 7 (or 15?) Mbps up, with 400+ GB download per month.
Shaw also has a 250 Mbps down option, and an unlimited download (no data cap) option. Neither of which are available with DSL.
Telus' fastest (and most expensive) DSL connection (at least in Kamloops) is 25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up. And you can only get that if you sign up for either Optik TV or satellite.
Telus knows they have the worse Internet options and are trying to get people to sign up for 3-year contracts by offering free Xbox 360s, laptops, tablets, and sometimes all three.
If you play your cards right, you can get Shaw to give you 25 Mbps Internet, digital cable (channels 2-70 except MovieCentral), and home phone basic for $49.90/month for 12 months (no contract, though, so you can cancel at any time). They'll even throw in a PVR that's yours to keep, even if you cancel their service. You can't get that with DSL/satellite/IPTV companies.
And this is different from Word, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc how exactly? At least with WP you know which formatting tag was deleted and can easily repair it. With Word, delete the wrong space and you can lose formatting for the word, the paragraph, the page, or even the whole document.
What's the point of having a big 4" screen if you constantly lose half of it to an on-screen keyboard? Especially in landscape when vertical pixels are at a premium? If I wanted to constantly have a 1" high screen, I'd buy an older model QWERTY phone, the landscape screen size would be the same as a 4" keyboardless phone.
Not everyone buys a phone just to watch videos or play games. some buy it to use as a phone (giant screens aren't that great to talk on), or to type a lot (QWERTY phones have more usable screen space even if the actual screen is smaller), or have issues with on-screen keyboards.
There's no such thing as "the one perfect phone for everyone", just as there's no "perfect keyboard" for everyone. Hardware keyboards aren't going anywhere. Here's hoping more manufacturers add them to their offerings.
It would be so nice if the major Android phone manufacturers would stop spitting out new phones every 6 weeks, and instead focused on 2-3 phone hardware platforms per year. I say platforms in that they use the exact same innards (SoC, storage, etc) but with 1-2 screen sizes, and with/without keyboards.
Sony Ericsson is the closest to doing this with the Xperia Mini/Mini Pro, Xperia Neo/Pro, and Xperia Arc/Play. They all basically have the same hardware, with just screen size and keyboard/gamepad variations.
Just imagine how much simpler life would be for their Android devs, support staff, and customers if they did this.
The "native Linux version" is just WordPerfect 2000 (aka 9) for Windows packaged up with its own private copy of WINE.
There's been a native UNIX version of WordPerfect for years before that, but it used the horrid Motif GUI toolkit, multiple windows, and just wasn't nice to use.
There hasn't been a truly native Linux version of WordPerfect yet.
"Reveal Codes" has been a feature of WordPerfect from the beginning, way back in the DOS days when you couldn't do WYSIWYG wordprocessing. Back then, all you could do was underline, italicise, or bold characters onscreen, so another method was needed to do all the fancy page layout. Since WP used SGML right from the getgo, it was simple to just show the SGML tags (aka "Reveal Codes").
The other big feature of WordPerfect was "Make it Fit". That feature helped me a lot in high school and university. Take a 3.5 page document and stretch it out to 5 pages without making it too obvious. Or take a 6 page doc and shrink it down to 5 pages. Wonderful feature.
The other really big feature of WordPerfect was file format compatibility, both forward and backward. You can open WP for DOS files in WP for Windows without any issues. You can open WP 14 files in WP 9 without installing anything extra. The whole SGML document format was so far ahead of its time (ODT is a poor bastardisation of it using XML).
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was an awesome app. WordPerfect 6-8 for Windows weren't that great. WordPerfect 9 (aka 2000) was awesome, and was "ported" over to Linux as well (although it used a private WINE install to do it) Never used WordPerfect 10-12. Tried WordPerfect 13/14, and they were ok.
Even though I haven't touched WordPerfect in many years, I still miss it everytime I use Open/LibreOffice. And I always cringe anytime I have to use MS Word and do any kind of formatting.
Carriers can block a WP7 update. However, they are not allowed to block 2 updates in a row.
A lot of the carriers blocked the first update after all the bug reports started rolling in. Because of that, they we're not allowed to block the latest update. Which is why pretty much everyone is able to update to 7.5 'mango.
No, it's easier to refer to a number than a name, especially when comparing two versions.
Without knowing about the alphabet trick, how does one know that "honeycomb" is better than "eclair"? Or that "froyo" came before "gingerbread"? Or that "some-other-weird-name" is worse than "ice cream sandwich"?
At least with version numbers, you know which came first, which came later, and which (in theory) should be better. 1.5 1.6 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.0 4.0
Names may be easier to remember for some. But relationships between items is *much* simpler for everyone using numbers.
You do realise that "Shit by Dad Says" has absolutely 0 to do with Shatner's life, right? That it's based entirely on the book by the same name? And that the book is semi-auto-biographical, as the author actually lives with his dad, and those are the things that his dad said to him?
You do also realise that at a later Trek convention, Shatner recanted, and has come to approve of his Trek fans way-of-life, and to even revel in all the wonders of Trek conventions? If not, maybe you should read his books.
The fact you would judge a man based on one single act, and then never look into it further (especially considering that even took place some 30-odd years ago), says a lot more about you than about him.
And several Android phones (like the Motorola Droid 3) use chroot and other sandboxing techniques to isolate apps even further from each other. Right down to randomising the UID of the "normal user" account on the phone.
This is one of the reasons it's been so hard to root the Droid 3.
New Super Mario Wii does the same thing. If you die too many times on a level, the game will flip you into "god mode" (or whatever they call it) and run your character through the level for you.
Not sure about the States, but in Canada, you can only have two active, simultaneous streams. Try to watch a show on a third device, and you get a message saying you can't.
IOW, NetFlix already has prevention measures (that make sense) in place.
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Many students did. :)
We thought we had things locked down nice and tight the first time through. Then we had a tech sit in on a class using "Exam Mode". Students had broken out and were on Facebook within 2 minutes of booting the system! Was quite the eye-opener!
Which is why it went through so many iterations before they used it for the first e-exam. :)
And we watch the labs periodically to see if anyone has found any news ways around our blocks, just to make sure. :)
That's what we do. All our Linux stations boot off the network and use NFS mounts for everything. For government exams, teachers reboot the stations into "Exam Mode" which disables everything possible, launches a bare-bones X11 session with Firefox as the "WM", with all settings locked in, including an add-on that let's you specify a list of sites that are accessible, blocking access to everything else.
Took a few iterations to get the configuration locked down completely, but there's really no better way to find the holes than watch a class of students try to break it. :)
It's not bullet-proof, but we've made it hard enough that it's very obvious when a student is trying to break out of the box that anyone watching the lab will notice. :)
If you can't change the OS config, you can't lock it down.
They aren't bulkier, unless you compare them to the uber-excessively-unwieldy-thin phones like the Droid Razr. Any phone that's under 10 mm thick is unwieldy and uncomfortable to hold unless you have childish/girlish hands. Sure, it looks pretty ... but they are a pain to use.
An Xperia Pro is actually thinner than an iPhone 4/4S. A Droid 3 is actually thinner. The HTC sliders are the same thickness as an iPhone 4/4S.
Rather than worrying about who has the slimmest dick...er...phone, it would be nice if phone manufacturers worried about "comfort", "fit in the hand", and "extra room for more battery".
Keyboard phones are not "bulky". The Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro is the same thickness as an iPhone 4/4S. The Droid 3 is thinner. Others are the same thickness. Unless you are comparing them to uber-thin (and unwieldy) phones like the Droid Razr, keyboard phones are no less "bulky" than non-keyboard phones.
The giant screened (4"+) non-keyboard phones are a lot more unwieldy than a smaller-screened (3.5-4.0") keyboard phone, due to the width of the screen. Thickness is actually a good thing in a phone, as you have something to grab onto and hold. A super-thin, wide phone (like the Galaxy S, Galaxy Nexus, Droid Razr, etc) are actually harder to hold *because of* their thinness.
As for giant phones being hard to talk on, it's due to the awkwardness of holding onto a wafer-thin, extra wide case. They are not comfortable to hold, nor easy to hold.
As for "typing a lot" on a phone, the main selling features of a smartphone are SMS, IM, E-mail ... all things you have to type. And then the apps. How do you expect to use an SSH client, an IM client, an e-mail app, when half the screen is taken up by the onscreen keyboard, a quarter of the screen taken up by the previous message, and only a quarter of the screen left for your message?
I don't want a tablet, as they don't fit in my pocket. I want a smartphone that's easy to type on, since it's used for ... typing e-mail, SMS, IM messages.
I don't want a bluetooth keyboard, as that's just another thing to lose and have to carry around.
I don't want a crappy onscreen keyboard with no tactile feedback, where my fingers obscure the keys, where keypresses are picked up by the wrong keys due to the size of my fingertips, where the keyboard takes up half (or more) of the screen.
I want a decent sized screen (3.5-4"), with a hardware keyboard. Thankfully, there are some manufacturers who understand this, and make keyboards versions available.
You don't really need to keep the physical form factor the same in order to create a viable accessories ecosystem. You just need to keep the ports in the same location.
The reason the Apple accessories market is so huge is that there's only 1 connector you need to worry about, it's always located in the same location, it's always the same size, etc.
We don't need a "dock" connector on Android, as we already have mini-HDMI and micro-USB which covers everything a "dock" connector would: video, audio, data, power, etc. Shoot, you could even put the headphone jack next to them if you want to support analog audio.
What's missing is a standardised location (put them both side-by-side) and distance between the ports. Every phone manufacturer puts them in different places, and it's different even between phone models.
If they would standardise this (even if only within a single manufacturer, across all their phone models), accessories makers would appear overnight.
While Shaw cable Internet prices may be higher than DSL (Telus usually), their download speeds and data caps are also much, much, much higher.
Shaw DOCSCIS 2.0 connections top out at 25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up, with 400 GB download per month.
Shaw DOCSIS 3.0 connections starts at 50 Mbps down, 7 (or 15?) Mbps up, with 400+ GB download per month.
Shaw also has a 250 Mbps down option, and an unlimited download (no data cap) option. Neither of which are available with DSL.
Telus' fastest (and most expensive) DSL connection (at least in Kamloops) is 25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up. And you can only get that if you sign up for either Optik TV or satellite.
Telus knows they have the worse Internet options and are trying to get people to sign up for 3-year contracts by offering free Xbox 360s, laptops, tablets, and sometimes all three.
If you play your cards right, you can get Shaw to give you 25 Mbps Internet, digital cable (channels 2-70 except MovieCentral), and home phone basic for $49.90/month for 12 months (no contract, though, so you can cancel at any time). They'll even throw in a PVR that's yours to keep, even if you cancel their service. You can't get that with DSL/satellite/IPTV companies.
And this is different from Word, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc how exactly? At least with WP you know which formatting tag was deleted and can easily repair it. With Word, delete the wrong space and you can lose formatting for the word, the paragraph, the page, or even the whole document.
Western Digital RE4 drives now come with 64 MB of cache.
What's the point of having a big 4" screen if you constantly lose half of it to an on-screen keyboard? Especially in landscape when vertical pixels are at a premium? If I wanted to constantly have a 1" high screen, I'd buy an older model QWERTY phone, the landscape screen size would be the same as a 4" keyboardless phone.
Not everyone buys a phone just to watch videos or play games. some buy it to use as a phone (giant screens aren't that great to talk on), or to type a lot (QWERTY phones have more usable screen space even if the actual screen is smaller), or have issues with on-screen keyboards.
There's no such thing as "the one perfect phone for everyone", just as there's no "perfect keyboard" for everyone. Hardware keyboards aren't going anywhere. Here's hoping more manufacturers add them to their offerings.
I hear you.
It would be so nice if the major Android phone manufacturers would stop spitting out new phones every 6 weeks, and instead focused on 2-3 phone hardware platforms per year. I say platforms in that they use the exact same innards (SoC, storage, etc) but with 1-2 screen sizes, and with/without keyboards.
Sony Ericsson is the closest to doing this with the Xperia Mini/Mini Pro, Xperia Neo/Pro, and Xperia Arc/Play. They all basically have the same hardware, with just screen size and keyboard/gamepad variations.
Just imagine how much simpler life would be for their Android devs, support staff, and customers if they did this.
The "native Linux version" is just WordPerfect 2000 (aka 9) for Windows packaged up with its own private copy of WINE.
There's been a native UNIX version of WordPerfect for years before that, but it used the horrid Motif GUI toolkit, multiple windows, and just wasn't nice to use.
There hasn't been a truly native Linux version of WordPerfect yet.
"Reveal Codes" has been a feature of WordPerfect from the beginning, way back in the DOS days when you couldn't do WYSIWYG wordprocessing. Back then, all you could do was underline, italicise, or bold characters onscreen, so another method was needed to do all the fancy page layout. Since WP used SGML right from the getgo, it was simple to just show the SGML tags (aka "Reveal Codes").
The other big feature of WordPerfect was "Make it Fit". That feature helped me a lot in high school and university. Take a 3.5 page document and stretch it out to 5 pages without making it too obvious. Or take a 6 page doc and shrink it down to 5 pages. Wonderful feature.
The other really big feature of WordPerfect was file format compatibility, both forward and backward. You can open WP for DOS files in WP for Windows without any issues. You can open WP 14 files in WP 9 without installing anything extra. The whole SGML document format was so far ahead of its time (ODT is a poor bastardisation of it using XML).
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was an awesome app.
WordPerfect 6-8 for Windows weren't that great.
WordPerfect 9 (aka 2000) was awesome, and was "ported" over to Linux as well (although it used a private WINE install to do it)
Never used WordPerfect 10-12.
Tried WordPerfect 13/14, and they were ok.
Even though I haven't touched WordPerfect in many years, I still miss it everytime I use Open/LibreOffice. And I always cringe anytime I have to use MS Word and do any kind of formatting.
Coffee whitener works better. :) And it's not suitable for consumption, unlike flour. :D
Samsung Galaxy Nexus has a 1280x720 screen. And most Android 4.0 devices coming out in the next 12 months will include 1280x720 screens.
And pretty much every Android device released this year includes a mini-HDMI port for connecting to 720p and 1080p screens.
IOW, current and future Android phones can already do what you think they can't.
Yes, the iPhone has the highest marketshare of any* phone*. And Android has the highest marketshare of any smarphone *OS*.
What's your point?
Carriers can block a WP7 update. However, they are not allowed to block 2 updates in a row.
A lot of the carriers blocked the first update after all the bug reports started rolling in. Because of that, they we're not allowed to block the latest update. Which is why pretty much everyone is able to update to 7.5 'mango.
No, it's easier to refer to a number than a name, especially when comparing two versions.
Without knowing about the alphabet trick, how does one know that "honeycomb" is better than "eclair"? Or that "froyo" came before "gingerbread"? Or that "some-other-weird-name" is worse than "ice cream sandwich"?
At least with version numbers, you know which came first, which came later, and which (in theory) should be better. 1.5 1.6 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.0 4.0
Names may be easier to remember for some. But relationships between items is *much* simpler for everyone using numbers.
You do realise that "Shit by Dad Says" has absolutely 0 to do with Shatner's life, right? That it's based entirely on the book by the same name? And that the book is semi-auto-biographical, as the author actually lives with his dad, and those are the things that his dad said to him?
You do also realise that at a later Trek convention, Shatner recanted, and has come to approve of his Trek fans way-of-life, and to even revel in all the wonders of Trek conventions? If not, maybe you should read his books.
The fact you would judge a man based on one single act, and then never look into it further (especially considering that even took place some 30-odd years ago), says a lot more about you than about him.
And several Android phones (like the Motorola Droid 3) use chroot and other sandboxing techniques to isolate apps even further from each other. Right down to randomising the UID of the "normal user" account on the phone.
This is one of the reasons it's been so hard to root the Droid 3.
File copy progress bars haven't "bounced around", but installation progress bars certainly do. :) Especially for Microsoft products.
New Super Mario Wii does the same thing. If you die too many times on a level, the game will flip you into "god mode" (or whatever they call it) and run your character through the level for you.
But the Euro is so easy, there's only 3 numbers to remember, and you multiply each pattern by 10.
1, 2, 5 cents
10, 20, 50 cents
1, 2, 5 euro
10, 20, 50 euro
100, 200, 500 euro
And so on. It's really a nice setup when you think about it.
Not sure about the States, but in Canada, you can only have two active, simultaneous streams. Try to watch a show on a third device, and you get a message saying you can't.
IOW, NetFlix already has prevention measures (that make sense) in place.
IOW, resolutions are getting worse over time.
My first laptop was a Fujitsu Lifebook 765dx, with a Pentium-MMX 166 MHz CPU and a 12" screen. That screen was 1024x768.
Nowadays, most 10-12" laptops are 1024x600 or 1376x768, barely any better.
It's sad, really, when you think about modern LCD resolutions compared to the CRTs we had 10 years ago. :(
Isn't this one of the reasons for the existence of the Amazon Android Market?