People would put up with either of these to some extent, but the combination made them simply not worth the hassle. Crap products which make life difficult are dead products.
I don't know if that's why their losing ground but it seems like every day I run into some little annoyance or another that MS has INTENTIONALLY placed there as a form of lock in. None of them are big deals individually but there's a cumulative effect at work. I mean, I run into plenty of problems in the Free Software world as well but I don't usually get the feeling like someone is actively trying to make my life harder than it has to be.
I'm wondering if all those devices are replacing desktops, or complementing them.
We had some family over for the 4th of July weekend including a bunch of teens and pre-teens. I noticed lots of texting, quite a bit of social media, and a fair bit of web browsing on my and my wife's Droids but only once did anybody ask to use my computer and that was just because they saw me editing some of the photos I'd taken the day before and wanted a closer look. I got the distinct impression that for that generation PCs just arn't as important as they are to mine.
If you are wrong and you know it, lying apparently makes people think that you've got a set of huge brass balls,
It's human nature. When I was a kid I worked for a while at the drive through of a fast food restaurant. If you just handed a person a bag and said "Have a nice day" with confidence they'd just drive right off. If however, you actually stopped to check that they were getting what they ordered then they'd hold up the line forever re-checking it. It's as if they saw that extra bit of care as a lack of confidence.
oters are why American politics is broken. If running a campaign that way caused a candidate to lose, then campaigns wouldn't be run that way.
Agreed, but I think it's just hacking human nature. People tend to believe what they want to believe and in most cases they/we are really voting "against" one candidate rather than "for" one. Once you get to the general election most people will stick with their candidate even if they're backtracking because they see them as still better than the other guy rather than punish their candidate for lying.
They don't HAVE to do anything but it's hard to view them as "a truly libertarian organisation" if they don't even believe an individual has a right to defend themselves. When they say that only some of the BOR actually count they give up any sort of moral high ground in my book.
I think you're mixing up a bunch of different things. It's true that amateur radio licenses can operate on different frequencies than the rest of us and can transmit at high power levels on those frequencies. Their call sign is assigned when they get their licence and they are required to broadcast it at regular intervals while transmitting (among other rules). This call sign has nothing whatsoever to do with WiFi ssids.
Nuclear produces no emissions, and it takes so little uranium to make a plant that the issues associated with mining are small.
It may not take a lot of uranium to run a power plant but it takes quite a lot of uranium ore to make a small amount of uranium suitible for a typical power plant. I have relatives who live in a small town that is/was a superfund clean up site due to the uranium mining in the area. Their little town even has it's own hospital due to the resulting cancer rates.
How could you possibly be posting on/. and not have understood how this thing works? Also this functionality is part of the Market app and it DOES disclose what it can do the first time you run it at which point you can choose not agree. Android works just fine without the Market app so I don't see the problem.
The whole big picture idea of Android phones is that it is "Integrated" with the cloud. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, Market...... Even a lot of third party apps rely on google services to do their thing. All of that integration enables a lot of flexibility , the ability to switch phones/devices without having to migrate your data, ability to push cpu/storage intensive apps like translation off to Google's servers but the trade off is that your phone is very reliant on the network and especially Google. Now I can see why someone wouldn't be comfortable with that arrangement, heck I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it and that's part of why rooted my Droid right away but if you've bought into the whole concept of your phone just being a "dumb terminal to the cloud" then it seems silly to complain that they can install/remove apps.
Is there even a way to turn this feature off? I.e., lets say I buy a handset and I definitely do *not* want Google nuking my apps remotely or adding apps to my phone remotely without my knowledge.
If you're rooted it's pretty easy to remove the market.apk from/system/app . I did this with some of the other default apps that like to start up automatically but I never use.
Whenever a Windows Mobile user would have me look at their phone to fix it, I'd find that they had a half-dozen things still running: control panel, mail, notepad, contacts... all of these things were things where they had finished their work with those apps, but they either didn't realize that they had to close the apps or they were too lazy to press "Menu->File->Quit".
Why on earth should you have to quit programs when you're done with them if they're just sitting there anyway? Any given chumk of ram is consuming the same amount of power weather it's holding a program, random bits, or all zeros so you're not saving any power by closing it and if you wanted to go back to that program later isn't it better that it's already loaded and ready to go?
Apple's restrictions on multitasking make little sense from a technical point of view. From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
While multitasking hasn't been a problem (battery drain or otherwise) on my Droid it certainly could be with a poorly designed app and I think Apple's approach probably does simplify things a bit for the app developer and user. For example, many of the apps on my Droid have options for how often to do various things in the background (check mail, plot my position on a map etc) but I guess Iphone folks don't ever have to deal with that except for a few apps. So far I've been pleasently surprised by how well behaved most of the android apps seem to be and I wouldn't personally want to give up multitasking for a little more simplicity but I can see their logic.
It's amazing to me that Android users are so willing to trust total strangers in defense of their chosen platform. Such information, if published about Microsoft or Apple would have everyone lighting their torches, open source or not.
Err.. that's exactly the situation with MS, Apple, and even Linux on PCs. There's nothing at all to stop you're email program from reading all of your personal data and sending copies to whereever it wants.
Specifically, once you grant an App the ability to dial a number, can it do so without user intervention?
So what's the alternative? Have the OS pop up a seperate confirmation dialog box every time you tell one of your apps to dial a number? That would get old pretty quick. This IS a phone after all so it's not surprising that many of the apps are going to need regular access to the phone functionality.
Will it prompt after future updates?
Currently yes, every update displays the list of permissions for that app/update just the same as a new install. I'm not sure if that will remain in 2.2 though.
It seems like an important security feature. The same with audio recording, accessing personal information, etc. All it would take would be an unscrupulous developer who had a seemingly innocent app, who later pushes out updates that allow this access behind the scenes, or one who doesn't even bother with an app update to hide what their doing, much like the banking software that was used to store users banking credentials.
Just like on a PC? At some point you just have to trust the software you've chosen to install. If you want to limit you're risk then the easiest thing is to limit your installed apps to a limited number of trusted ones. About the only improvement I can think of would be to have a nicely formatted log of what apps have done what and when. The logging is already there (catlog or logcat, I forget) so we'd just need a tool to parse the logs and pull out the relevant info.
Performance is pretty good except at night... I have the cameras set to switch to 'night mode' at night which means B&W and no IR filter... Unfortunately, if someone walks past, across the street from one of the cameras, all I get is a few frames with a blurry person in various stages of walking... Night is when I want clarity... My guess is I need a better lens or at best, more clue.
If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don't know how to justify that one.
The sad fact is that many people don't have that foresight and as a result without SS we would have millions more people homeless on the streets and starving to death. Don't you think that eventually that would become your problem one way or another?
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I don't know if that's why their losing ground but it seems like every day I run into some little annoyance or another that MS has INTENTIONALLY placed there as a form of lock in. None of them are big deals individually but there's a cumulative effect at work. I mean, I run into plenty of problems in the Free Software world as well but I don't usually get the feeling like someone is actively trying to make my life harder than it has to be.
We had some family over for the 4th of July weekend including a bunch of teens and pre-teens. I noticed lots of texting, quite a bit of social media, and a fair bit of web browsing on my and my wife's Droids but only once did anybody ask to use my computer and that was just because they saw me editing some of the photos I'd taken the day before and wanted a closer look. I got the distinct impression that for that generation PCs just arn't as important as they are to mine.
Is MS losing money ?
"Microsoft reports first YoY revenue slide in company history" ...so I guess that would be a "yes".
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/04/24/microsoft-reports-first-yoy-revenue-slide-in-company-history/
Since when is having revenue that is less than last year but still positive considered "losing money"?
It's human nature. When I was a kid I worked for a while at the drive through of a fast food restaurant. If you just handed a person a bag and said "Have a nice day" with confidence they'd just drive right off. If however, you actually stopped to check that they were getting what they ordered then they'd hold up the line forever re-checking it. It's as if they saw that extra bit of care as a lack of confidence.
Wow where are my mod points when I need them? Well put!
Agreed, but I think it's just hacking human nature. People tend to believe what they want to believe and in most cases they/we are really voting "against" one candidate rather than "for" one. Once you get to the general election most people will stick with their candidate even if they're backtracking because they see them as still better than the other guy rather than punish their candidate for lying.
They don't HAVE to do anything but it's hard to view them as "a truly libertarian organisation" if they don't even believe an individual has a right to defend themselves. When they say that only some of the BOR actually count they give up any sort of moral high ground in my book.
I think you're mixing up a bunch of different things. It's true that amateur radio licenses can operate on different frequencies than the rest of us and can transmit at high power levels on those frequencies. Their call sign is assigned when they get their licence and they are required to broadcast it at regular intervals while transmitting (among other rules). This call sign has nothing whatsoever to do with WiFi ssids.
And yet they're pretty anti-2A. If you don't even have the right to defend you're own life then the other rights are mostly just academic.
It may not take a lot of uranium to run a power plant but it takes quite a lot of uranium ore to make a small amount of uranium suitible for a typical power plant. I have relatives who live in a small town that is/was a superfund clean up site due to the uranium mining in the area. Their little town even has it's own hospital due to the resulting cancer rates.
How could you possibly be posting on /. and not have understood how this thing works? Also this functionality is part of the Market app and it DOES disclose what it can do the first time you run it at which point you can choose not agree. Android works just fine without the Market app so I don't see the problem.
The whole big picture idea of Android phones is that it is "Integrated" with the cloud. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, Market...... Even a lot of third party apps rely on google services to do their thing. All of that integration enables a lot of flexibility , the ability to switch phones/devices without having to migrate your data, ability to push cpu/storage intensive apps like translation off to Google's servers but the trade off is that your phone is very reliant on the network and especially Google. Now I can see why someone wouldn't be comfortable with that arrangement, heck I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it and that's part of why rooted my Droid right away but if you've bought into the whole concept of your phone just being a "dumb terminal to the cloud" then it seems silly to complain that they can install/remove apps.
If you're rooted it's pretty easy to remove the market.apk from /system/app . I did this with some of the other default apps that like to start up automatically but I never use.
Why on earth should you have to quit programs when you're done with them if they're just sitting there anyway? Any given chumk of ram is consuming the same amount of power weather it's holding a program, random bits, or all zeros so you're not saving any power by closing it and if you wanted to go back to that program later isn't it better that it's already loaded and ready to go?
While multitasking hasn't been a problem (battery drain or otherwise) on my Droid it certainly could be with a poorly designed app and I think Apple's approach probably does simplify things a bit for the app developer and user. For example, many of the apps on my Droid have options for how often to do various things in the background (check mail, plot my position on a map etc) but I guess Iphone folks don't ever have to deal with that except for a few apps. So far I've been pleasently surprised by how well behaved most of the android apps seem to be and I wouldn't personally want to give up multitasking for a little more simplicity but I can see their logic.
Was anyone else surprised that they just got that?
FWIW you can get screw drivers / bits for just about every kind of security screw at any decent hardware store.
ACK!! who the h*ll are they hiring over at EETimes these days?
So did you downrate these apps and make a comment explaining why? Email the authors?
Err.. that's exactly the situation with MS, Apple, and even Linux on PCs. There's nothing at all to stop you're email program from reading all of your personal data and sending copies to whereever it wants.
So what's the alternative? Have the OS pop up a seperate confirmation dialog box every time you tell one of your apps to dial a number? That would get old pretty quick. This IS a phone after all so it's not surprising that many of the apps are going to need regular access to the phone functionality.
Currently yes, every update displays the list of permissions for that app/update just the same as a new install. I'm not sure if that will remain in 2.2 though.
Just like on a PC? At some point you just have to trust the software you've chosen to install. If you want to limit you're risk then the easiest thing is to limit your installed apps to a limited number of trusted ones. About the only improvement I can think of would be to have a nicely formatted log of what apps have done what and when. The logging is already there (catlog or logcat, I forget) so we'd just need a tool to parse the logs and pull out the relevant info.
Or a light...
The sad fact is that many people don't have that foresight and as a result without SS we would have millions more people homeless on the streets and starving to death. Don't you think that eventually that would become your problem one way or another?
And the EU's total energy consumption has dropped by how much exactly?
I don't know but they're sure going to be hard to find in the dark :)