But with more people listening to music on iPods and watching video on DVD/DVR - to say nothing of streaming services over IP - that's a lot more gaps in the system.
Well, all DVRs (cable OR third party like TiVo) are mandated by the FCC to listen for an EAS broadcast and instantly switch over to the appropriate channel.
So even if you were watching a recorded program that way, the DVR must drop out of playback and switch over to live TV. (This has caused no end of headaches for those trying to record early/late programming as stations do their testing).
I know, I've been pondering a tablet, but it's hard to tell what even supports 5 GHz. Do any of the current 10"-class tablets?
Easy. Look for 802.11a support.
All good tablets will have one of two labels for the WiFi - 802.11bgn, or 802.11abgn. (If the tablet doesn't have 802.11n support, back away from it and pick another one).
802.11a only works on 5GHz. If you don't see it on the list, then it's 2.4GHz only (including N). If you see a, then it's 2.4 GHz (b/g/n) and 5GHz(a/n).
Smartphones I can understand not having 5GHz - it takes another antenna and more power because you have to drive a 5GHz amplifier and all that. Tablets, not so much, especially since they should be following the iPad example and supporting 5GHz out of the box.
And the new Nexus phone (Nexus Galaxy) and the previous one (Nexus S) has no SD card slot, so there is no need for a VFAT enabled kernel, they probably use MTP like my Xoom does to access the internal memory. Other Samsung devices has SD Card, but not those branded as Nexus.
And how do you get your music/movies/etc on the phone? Using iTunes?
You plug phone in, enable USB mode, and the internal storage is mounted in disk mode, so Windows needs to be able to mount the disk at FAT32.
So the kernel needs to mount it as it's exported as a raw disk for people to copy files over with. MTP is iffy as it can require drivers and INF files, as does RNDIS mode. Mass Storage is the only real driverless mode short of having fancy installers to get their phone working under Windows.
Which may not be a bad idea for Android. Apple gets away with it. Everyone else gets away with it - it's time for Google to get down and support something on the desktop...
They use traffic analysis. If they see anything that looks unlike a typical plain-jane "smart" phone, like torrent traffic or web traffic from a browser with a desktop user agent, or VPN traffic, you are accused of tethering and receive a tethering bill or get cut off.
Of course an open phone could do all three of those things by itself, no problem.
Or just block everything except 80/443. After all, smartphones and apps only make HTTP(S) requests, so no reason to provide more port. Stick 'em behind double NATs while you're at it, and put in a transparent caching proxy server.
Though, Sprint's apparently a Tier-1, so they give everyone a real live IP address.
A WWAN data connection is not necessarily stnadard internet connection - they can and do often use NAT (or double or more), proxies (transparent - usually degrading images at a minimum), firewalls and port blockers.
Verizon, for instance, blocks IRC - I don't know if it was done as part of only allowing 80/443 or if they've selectively blocked it. Sprint's probably the best, and they're just doing it via the phone - "mobile hotspot" use is a feature that's checked against your account, so something that proxies through the phone will probably go unnoticed. (CDMA phones have a separate "tethering" channel).
Because if you're in Canada the Kindle Fire isn't available and even if you get one anyway has no content available? Amazon in Canada is a pretty pathetic shadow of it's US version.
The Kobo on the other hand has a pretty strong seller in Indigo books and has content. It's all right there in the summary about the Kobo stuff being targetted more internationally. Just because someone in the US wouldn't want one doesn't mean anything on the rest of the planet.
And Kobo knows it. That's why they produce the crappiest e-readers on the market - because they know that if you're not in the US (and Kobo has a token presence there), you're stuck with them.
(And crappy in every bad way - the UI sucks, the hardware sucks, etc).
Yes, I'm in Canada. The best way to get a nook though is to drive across the border and pick one up. If you have a US address (doesn't need to be billing - just a US address) you can even buy books in Canada as well.
The idea of a secured system designed for the sole purpose of allowing executives and board members of the corporations to communicate in secret is profoundly disturbing on so many levels...
If it's a private company, not a big deal - that's why they're called private companies. What's worrying is that this is promoted by a stock exchange for the sole purpose of private communications and documents in public companies.
That's the big problem. I don't care if Craigslist (private) uses it - they don't have the disclosure rules and stuff that public companies like eBay have.
Lot's of people have ideas, but don't have the time or inclination to make them products.
And some people are simply too lazy to do so...
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone everyday comes up with plenty.
The hard part is turning an idea into reality, and it's even harder to turn that prototype into something manufacturable and saleable. Even then there's no guarantee it'll make it.
The problem is, the only way to do a study like this to be conclusive is well, you have to study over a long period of time. We're talking decades or more (I think this study only covered a decade).
They're all inconclusive because the link takes extremely long to develop. Cellphones in common use is a relatively recent thing (think 15 years or thereabouts where everyone has a cellphone), despite being easiliy available since the 80s.
Of course, though, we act like we can't live with them now. The 80s and early 90s must've been just terrible years for people who were growing up back then (mid-30s or so).
Just when their controller matures a bit they switch to a different one....?
Of course, because for some reason, these guys are making SSDs that push the performance envelope. There seems to be a big vacuum of "slower but stable" drives as everyone is racing to try to get 1GB/sec transfer speeds.
Then again, Apple probably is soaking up all the "slow, solid, reliable" SSDs. Plenty of computers and plenty of users who can get by with a slower drive that still does 150MB/sec - most of the speedup comes from the fact that random I/O on an SSD is an order of magnitude or more faster than a hard drive (most hard drives can only do just over 100 I/O a second. An SSD can do over 1000, and 10,000 is pretty common for a "slow" drive).
I can't recall the last time there was a firmware bug in a HDD that caused catastrophic loss of data... I can think of a couple RAID controllers, but nothing baked into the drives themselves. There's a lot of such problems in SSDs.
I know it's a generalization, but HDDs tend to fail more gracefully (though SMART is by no means foolproof, don't get me wrong) whereas SSD failures are characterized by simply not working one day.
Seagate was the most recent one - depending on how you rebooted your PC, it could just up and not show up. It was traced to a logfile bug - if the logfile reached a multiple of N, the next reset would hang the drive unless you cleared it manually. Heck, there are stupid firmware bugs in optical drives as well (I remember a Fedora release that killed drives merely because LG decided to use a common command as "firmware update").
And anyhow, blaming SSD problems on firmware is disingenous compared to hard drives - in an SSD, practically the only reason it dies prematurely are due to firmware bugs. A hard drive can fail is more ways that firmware errors are but a small part of the failure modes.
IBM's death star was due to using platters that weren't certified for the data density (an error when testing the platters).
And as I mentioned before, Apple buys and sells more SSD-equipped computers than anyone else (mostly Macbook Airs, but a few Pros are preconfigured with SSDs as well). They've sold enough that if there was a genuine SSD problem, it would've been big news. I don't know exact figures, but Apple would've shipped millions by now.
If you avoid the cutting edge super-high-performance SSDs, then you really ought to be fine, like Apple. They're not the fastest (still getting transfers around 150MB/sec rather than 250MB+/sec these new SSDs get), but they work reliably.
The only reason you may get warnings with hard drives is when they're failing mechanically. They can still up and die suddenly (usually more due to mechanical issues, but like Seagate, they can die due to firmware), especially if something happens that corrupts the on-disk firmware (hard drives "boot" from the platters - there's a bit of firmware that's just capable of spinning up the drive and seeking to the right spot in order to load the real drive firmware).
There's been a LOT of "you lose everything" bugs in the SSD market up till now.
There's plenty of "you lose everything" bugs in spinning rust drives as well.
From Western Digital drive failures that led to them being nicknamed "Western Digicrap", to IBM's Deathstar drives, Seagate's logfile one, etc.
Every manufacturer has come up with a line of drives that proved to be lemons, and we're talking about very mature technology here - it's been around since the IBM RAMAC.
SSDs are a game changer in that any idiot with a soldering iron and a few tools can build one in their garage - there's only a few controller chips out there from SandForce, Indilinx, J-Micron, Intel, and maybe a few others (Samsung, Toshiba, etc). And you buy the flash chips. Plop them on a board and you've made a storage deivce. Whereas hard drives require clean rooms, chemicals, mechanical engineering, etc.
Here's a funny question. Apple's probably the largest consumer of SSDs on the market (for their Macs, not the ones that go into iPhones/iPods/iPads). Yet there doesn't seem to be much about SSD sudden failure or loss of data or other thing. I wonder why that is...?
Perhaps it's the relative immaturity of the high-speed cutting edge SSDs and Apple goes for last-gen chips that give "good enough" performance and deliver on reliability?
have a question....what good will it be to get the source?
Well, a ton of devices use AOSP - Kindle Fire, Nook, many tablets and phones, so those will get 4.0 when it comes out.
The other reason is if you have the True Android Phone. Or several now - the Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus phones, which are completely open and trivial to enable installing your own OS. Which is the whole point of Android.
The other phones? They're merely Android compatibles. Most have roots and other stuff that let you get them closer to the true Android phones.
They have Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan saga is quite young ("Cordelia's Honor" is in the list).
It's quite modern, and quite good as well. Dates to the 90s and 00's.
And one minute you're reading Cordelia's Honor and the next you're hunting around for the rest of the series. Thankfully, it's from Baen. They have almost every book for free download if you can find the CD site. (The missing one, Memory, is probably one of the best in the series and unfortunately has to be bought. It's an unfortunate oversight).
But it lacks TouchWiz, so that was going to fail anyhow. I don't know why Samsung bothers with TouchWiz - if we wanted an iPhone-like UI we'd have gotten an iPhone.
It's the rectangle-with-rounded-corners-plus-TouchWiz that got Apple's ire, if you look at the screenshots, the Samsung looks like a fattened iPhone.
I just hope that my phone gets updated to this. I'm still stuck with Froyo and my phone just came out in July. That's one of the most frustrating aspects of Android phones - the manufacturers do not upgrade the phones. With the quick turnover in phone OSes, it's inexcusable for manufacturers to stick with old OSes. I can understand if the phone hardware cannot handle the upgrade but I know that many phone manufacturers simply do not want to support their devices. Instead, to get updates we have to turn to CyanogenMod. This is one reason iPhones are so popular (yes, I know Android is overtaking iOS but the iPhone is the most popular smartphone model), at least Apple does a good job of updating iOS and getting it to as many iPhones as possible.
You didn't buy an Android phone. You bought an Android *COMPATIBLE* phone.
There are now TWO Android phones out there on the market - Nexus S and Nexus Prime or whatever it's called. These obey the same reasons why we hate iOS - and these phones give complete freedom very easily. The compatible phones, they have to be "rooted" and "unlocked" to get to that point. Sure it's trivially easy on a lot of phones, but it's just like jailbreaking on iOS - why do you have to do it? Rooting/unlocking is trivial on a real Android phone (instructions are out before you can get your hands on it - Google publishes it!).
And you can always get the latest updates immediately - just update your tree and build it.
Android is just a phone OS that OEMs and carriers pervert to their will. The best bet is to with as pure Android as possible, which means going with the Google phones.
Apple can do it because they've told carriers to bend over and take it. Google's pretty much done the same. HTC, Samsung, LG,... nope, they'll bend to carrier's wishes.
My experience with this: Usually these games are of lower quality. Often it is a good and original idea, but the implementation is lacking.
If you only have 48 hours to code up a complete game from scratch, I would expect that. Even a bestselling author won't write something good in just 48 hours without a lot of refinement. Or those essay questions on a test.
After 48 hours, you're looking at a rough draft, something that'll need a lot of polish to get the bugs out and the artwork quality up.
I'd say most games are like that - the initial coding part is pretty quick to come to a point of something that can be demonstrated, it's all the testing/debugging/polishing that takes the majority of the work.
The primary goal is to get a studio interested and make an investment, or to judge interest to see if it's worthwhile making the huge leap to something releasable.
GPS is great, sure, but IIRC Galileo isn't compatible without devices being modified to also accept Galileo signals. So this project is going to cost quite a bit of money in re-engineering and replacement costs for devices to use the new system in addition to GPS.
Broadcom has chips that do GPS and GLONASS together. I'm sure they'll have a 3-way GPS/GLONASS/Galileo chip you can use as well. Perhaps a little work on the software side to accomodate the changes, but nothing too estensive on the hardware side - just another antenna.
I have a PS3, and for the past few years, all the games I bought, both on physical disc or through PSN, can be still played, no problem, even though I have reformatted the harddisk 3 times so far (once due to replacing a bigger disk, once due to PS3 broke down and fixed, and once when my bigger disk failed).
And that's a problem.
A good thing I never bought a single thing on PSN because I can't get on PSN. Or use the PlayStation Store, either.
See, Sony decided to screw everyone over with a PS3. Before, you could play games and movies and do Linux. Now it's games and movies, or Linux. Until sony either pays for a Linux PC, or another PS3, I'm not paying.
Modern blu-rays demand I update the firmware. Games require I update the firmware. Even epending money requires I update the firmware. Nevermind I don't agree with the new PSN terms and conditions.
Yes, all I can do is play games that were released prior to April 1, 2010. And since then, I've bought Xbox360 games and iOS games. (Funny how Apple lets you still use their iTunes store to buy apps and music and movies while running old firmware and old software - it takes them forever to deprecate old iTunes versions).
Ah well, I'm not even sure if the 3G capability is prepaid by Sony or requires a subscription service to work.
Why are these machines always the same number in dollars and euros (just like apple devices) while the two currencies have different values?
Why doesn't the EU adopt the same method of calculating taxes that US and Canada does? You know, add the tax at the register?
You silly Europeans with your silly ideas of "you pay the price tag" means all taxes are built in, hiding stuff like 20% import duties and 20% VAT on top.
Bah. do it the American way. We know what the tax rate is, and we know it's $299 plus tax.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember seeing bunches of reports on Android back in the late Palm T|E days competing with Dell's Windows based mobile. iOS wasn't even on the radar then.
That's correct.
Android was demonstrated and shown off a few weeks before the iPhone was even announced back in 2007. There's a CES 2007 video showing Android.
Looking remarkably... blackberry-ish or WinMo ish with a 5-way navigator and stuff like that.
Then the iPhone was announced, and a serious amount of re-engineering happened to get it to the way it is today. (No, it didn't feature a touchscreen). It's why the initial release wasn't that great (no soft keyboard...?) - basically they took an entire year to re-engineer the UI.
The more I read about Chrome's design process the more I hear, "it's the Google way or no way at all"
Nothing wrong with that. I mean, it's the Apple-ification of Google. Just like Apple copied aspects from Android (the notification system was clearly inspired by Android), Google realizes that the Steve Jobs way does have certain benefits as well.
So, seeing something Stuxnet based is not a surprise... I just wonder what will be attacked first, some power company whose idea of security is turning off SSID broadcast (but leaving the wireless segment open so the old game console can get on without configuration), or perhaps some manufacturing company who has Joe Sixpack in receiving browsing pr0n between trucks causing malware entry will be the target. It really is only a matter of time when someone will knock something down.
No. None of the above. Stuxnet proved that even if you air-gapped the networks, the "secure" network can STILL be infected.
One of Stuxnet's actions was to replicate itself to USB drives. USB drives that can be carried towards the secure network (bonus - secure network computers are often unpatched because said patches have to be manually copied over!), where it can exploit an unpatched vulnerability to infect PCs on the "secure" network. From there, it can proceed to do the dirty work.
So even if you have an airgapped network that keeps the open SSID and pr0n browsing to the insecure side, the secure side can easily be infected by someone needing to copy a configuration file, updated data, or ironically, patches to the secure network.
This is especially true if the attackers are patient and can wait years for the results of their virus.
No, we'll just have *new* coastal cities. Much cleaner and nicer ones that New York, for sure.
Except, well, the entire population of New York would occupy the said new coastal city and those nearby, leading to New New York. I'm not so sure that's a good thing....
Slashdot Mirror
Well, all DVRs (cable OR third party like TiVo) are mandated by the FCC to listen for an EAS broadcast and instantly switch over to the appropriate channel.
So even if you were watching a recorded program that way, the DVR must drop out of playback and switch over to live TV. (This has caused no end of headaches for those trying to record early/late programming as stations do their testing).
Easy. Look for 802.11a support.
All good tablets will have one of two labels for the WiFi - 802.11bgn, or 802.11abgn. (If the tablet doesn't have 802.11n support, back away from it and pick another one).
802.11a only works on 5GHz. If you don't see it on the list, then it's 2.4GHz only (including N). If you see a, then it's 2.4 GHz (b/g/n) and 5GHz(a/n).
Smartphones I can understand not having 5GHz - it takes another antenna and more power because you have to drive a 5GHz amplifier and all that. Tablets, not so much, especially since they should be following the iPad example and supporting 5GHz out of the box.
And how do you get your music/movies/etc on the phone? Using iTunes?
You plug phone in, enable USB mode, and the internal storage is mounted in disk mode, so Windows needs to be able to mount the disk at FAT32.
So the kernel needs to mount it as it's exported as a raw disk for people to copy files over with. MTP is iffy as it can require drivers and INF files, as does RNDIS mode. Mass Storage is the only real driverless mode short of having fancy installers to get their phone working under Windows.
Which may not be a bad idea for Android. Apple gets away with it. Everyone else gets away with it - it's time for Google to get down and support something on the desktop...
Or just block everything except 80/443. After all, smartphones and apps only make HTTP(S) requests, so no reason to provide more port. Stick 'em behind double NATs while you're at it, and put in a transparent caching proxy server.
Though, Sprint's apparently a Tier-1, so they give everyone a real live IP address.
A WWAN data connection is not necessarily stnadard internet connection - they can and do often use NAT (or double or more), proxies (transparent - usually degrading images at a minimum), firewalls and port blockers.
Verizon, for instance, blocks IRC - I don't know if it was done as part of only allowing 80/443 or if they've selectively blocked it. Sprint's probably the best, and they're just doing it via the phone - "mobile hotspot" use is a feature that's checked against your account, so something that proxies through the phone will probably go unnoticed. (CDMA phones have a separate "tethering" channel).
GSM providers do it by APN differentiation.
And Kobo knows it. That's why they produce the crappiest e-readers on the market - because they know that if you're not in the US (and Kobo has a token presence there), you're stuck with them.
(And crappy in every bad way - the UI sucks, the hardware sucks, etc).
Yes, I'm in Canada. The best way to get a nook though is to drive across the border and pick one up. If you have a US address (doesn't need to be billing - just a US address) you can even buy books in Canada as well.
If it's a private company, not a big deal - that's why they're called private companies. What's worrying is that this is promoted by a stock exchange for the sole purpose of private communications and documents in public companies.
That's the big problem. I don't care if Craigslist (private) uses it - they don't have the disclosure rules and stuff that public companies like eBay have.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone everyday comes up with plenty.
The hard part is turning an idea into reality, and it's even harder to turn that prototype into something manufacturable and saleable. Even then there's no guarantee it'll make it.
The real work in anything is the implementation.
The problem is, the only way to do a study like this to be conclusive is well, you have to study over a long period of time. We're talking decades or more (I think this study only covered a decade).
They're all inconclusive because the link takes extremely long to develop. Cellphones in common use is a relatively recent thing (think 15 years or thereabouts where everyone has a cellphone), despite being easiliy available since the 80s.
Of course, though, we act like we can't live with them now. The 80s and early 90s must've been just terrible years for people who were growing up back then (mid-30s or so).
Of course, because for some reason, these guys are making SSDs that push the performance envelope. There seems to be a big vacuum of "slower but stable" drives as everyone is racing to try to get 1GB/sec transfer speeds.
Then again, Apple probably is soaking up all the "slow, solid, reliable" SSDs. Plenty of computers and plenty of users who can get by with a slower drive that still does 150MB/sec - most of the speedup comes from the fact that random I/O on an SSD is an order of magnitude or more faster than a hard drive (most hard drives can only do just over 100 I/O a second. An SSD can do over 1000, and 10,000 is pretty common for a "slow" drive).
It just makes general day-to-day use snappier.
Seagate was the most recent one - depending on how you rebooted your PC, it could just up and not show up. It was traced to a logfile bug - if the logfile reached a multiple of N, the next reset would hang the drive unless you cleared it manually. Heck, there are stupid firmware bugs in optical drives as well (I remember a Fedora release that killed drives merely because LG decided to use a common command as "firmware update").
And anyhow, blaming SSD problems on firmware is disingenous compared to hard drives - in an SSD, practically the only reason it dies prematurely are due to firmware bugs. A hard drive can fail is more ways that firmware errors are but a small part of the failure modes.
IBM's death star was due to using platters that weren't certified for the data density (an error when testing the platters).
And as I mentioned before, Apple buys and sells more SSD-equipped computers than anyone else (mostly Macbook Airs, but a few Pros are preconfigured with SSDs as well). They've sold enough that if there was a genuine SSD problem, it would've been big news. I don't know exact figures, but Apple would've shipped millions by now.
If you avoid the cutting edge super-high-performance SSDs, then you really ought to be fine, like Apple. They're not the fastest (still getting transfers around 150MB/sec rather than 250MB+/sec these new SSDs get), but they work reliably.
The only reason you may get warnings with hard drives is when they're failing mechanically. They can still up and die suddenly (usually more due to mechanical issues, but like Seagate, they can die due to firmware), especially if something happens that corrupts the on-disk firmware (hard drives "boot" from the platters - there's a bit of firmware that's just capable of spinning up the drive and seeking to the right spot in order to load the real drive firmware).
There's plenty of "you lose everything" bugs in spinning rust drives as well.
From Western Digital drive failures that led to them being nicknamed "Western Digicrap", to IBM's Deathstar drives, Seagate's logfile one, etc.
Every manufacturer has come up with a line of drives that proved to be lemons, and we're talking about very mature technology here - it's been around since the IBM RAMAC.
SSDs are a game changer in that any idiot with a soldering iron and a few tools can build one in their garage - there's only a few controller chips out there from SandForce, Indilinx, J-Micron, Intel, and maybe a few others (Samsung, Toshiba, etc). And you buy the flash chips. Plop them on a board and you've made a storage deivce. Whereas hard drives require clean rooms, chemicals, mechanical engineering, etc.
Here's a funny question. Apple's probably the largest consumer of SSDs on the market (for their Macs, not the ones that go into iPhones/iPods/iPads). Yet there doesn't seem to be much about SSD sudden failure or loss of data or other thing. I wonder why that is...?
Perhaps it's the relative immaturity of the high-speed cutting edge SSDs and Apple goes for last-gen chips that give "good enough" performance and deliver on reliability?
That won't happen for a LONG time.
SSDs only get cheaper in line with Moore's law (the number of transistors limits the size of the flash chips).
Hard drives, it seems, grow in capacity faster than Moore's law. At some point in the future they'll slow down, but that's a huge gap to catch up to.
Well, a ton of devices use AOSP - Kindle Fire, Nook, many tablets and phones, so those will get 4.0 when it comes out.
The other reason is if you have the True Android Phone. Or several now - the Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus phones, which are completely open and trivial to enable installing your own OS. Which is the whole point of Android.
The other phones? They're merely Android compatibles. Most have roots and other stuff that let you get them closer to the true Android phones.
They have Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan saga is quite young ("Cordelia's Honor" is in the list).
It's quite modern, and quite good as well. Dates to the 90s and 00's.
And one minute you're reading Cordelia's Honor and the next you're hunting around for the rest of the series. Thankfully, it's from Baen. They have almost every book for free download if you can find the CD site. (The missing one, Memory, is probably one of the best in the series and unfortunately has to be bought. It's an unfortunate oversight).
But it lacks TouchWiz, so that was going to fail anyhow. I don't know why Samsung bothers with TouchWiz - if we wanted an iPhone-like UI we'd have gotten an iPhone.
It's the rectangle-with-rounded-corners-plus-TouchWiz that got Apple's ire, if you look at the screenshots, the Samsung looks like a fattened iPhone.
Since this phone lacks TouchWiz, well, ...
You didn't buy an Android phone. You bought an Android *COMPATIBLE* phone.
There are now TWO Android phones out there on the market - Nexus S and Nexus Prime or whatever it's called. These obey the same reasons why we hate iOS - and these phones give complete freedom very easily. The compatible phones, they have to be "rooted" and "unlocked" to get to that point. Sure it's trivially easy on a lot of phones, but it's just like jailbreaking on iOS - why do you have to do it? Rooting/unlocking is trivial on a real Android phone (instructions are out before you can get your hands on it - Google publishes it!).
And you can always get the latest updates immediately - just update your tree and build it.
Android is just a phone OS that OEMs and carriers pervert to their will. The best bet is to with as pure Android as possible, which means going with the Google phones.
Apple can do it because they've told carriers to bend over and take it. Google's pretty much done the same. HTC, Samsung, LG, ... nope, they'll bend to carrier's wishes.
And nevermind about the AOSP based phones.
If you only have 48 hours to code up a complete game from scratch, I would expect that. Even a bestselling author won't write something good in just 48 hours without a lot of refinement. Or those essay questions on a test.
After 48 hours, you're looking at a rough draft, something that'll need a lot of polish to get the bugs out and the artwork quality up.
I'd say most games are like that - the initial coding part is pretty quick to come to a point of something that can be demonstrated, it's all the testing/debugging/polishing that takes the majority of the work.
The primary goal is to get a studio interested and make an investment, or to judge interest to see if it's worthwhile making the huge leap to something releasable.
Broadcom has chips that do GPS and GLONASS together. I'm sure they'll have a 3-way GPS/GLONASS/Galileo chip you can use as well. Perhaps a little work on the software side to accomodate the changes, but nothing too estensive on the hardware side - just another antenna.
And that's a problem.
A good thing I never bought a single thing on PSN because I can't get on PSN. Or use the PlayStation Store, either.
See, Sony decided to screw everyone over with a PS3. Before, you could play games and movies and do Linux. Now it's games and movies, or Linux. Until sony either pays for a Linux PC, or another PS3, I'm not paying.
Modern blu-rays demand I update the firmware. Games require I update the firmware. Even epending money requires I update the firmware. Nevermind I don't agree with the new PSN terms and conditions.
Yes, all I can do is play games that were released prior to April 1, 2010. And since then, I've bought Xbox360 games and iOS games. (Funny how Apple lets you still use their iTunes store to buy apps and music and movies while running old firmware and old software - it takes them forever to deprecate old iTunes versions).
Ah well, I'm not even sure if the 3G capability is prepaid by Sony or requires a subscription service to work.
Why doesn't the EU adopt the same method of calculating taxes that US and Canada does? You know, add the tax at the register?
You silly Europeans with your silly ideas of "you pay the price tag" means all taxes are built in, hiding stuff like 20% import duties and 20% VAT on top.
Bah. do it the American way. We know what the tax rate is, and we know it's $299 plus tax.
That's correct.
Android was demonstrated and shown off a few weeks before the iPhone was even announced back in 2007. There's a CES 2007 video showing Android.
Looking remarkably... blackberry-ish or WinMo ish with a 5-way navigator and stuff like that.
Then the iPhone was announced, and a serious amount of re-engineering happened to get it to the way it is today. (No, it didn't feature a touchscreen). It's why the initial release wasn't that great (no soft keyboard...?) - basically they took an entire year to re-engineer the UI.
Nothing wrong with that. I mean, it's the Apple-ification of Google. Just like Apple copied aspects from Android (the notification system was clearly inspired by Android), Google realizes that the Steve Jobs way does have certain benefits as well.
Win-win, everyone copies winning ideas!
No. None of the above. Stuxnet proved that even if you air-gapped the networks, the "secure" network can STILL be infected.
One of Stuxnet's actions was to replicate itself to USB drives. USB drives that can be carried towards the secure network (bonus - secure network computers are often unpatched because said patches have to be manually copied over!), where it can exploit an unpatched vulnerability to infect PCs on the "secure" network. From there, it can proceed to do the dirty work.
So even if you have an airgapped network that keeps the open SSID and pr0n browsing to the insecure side, the secure side can easily be infected by someone needing to copy a configuration file, updated data, or ironically, patches to the secure network.
This is especially true if the attackers are patient and can wait years for the results of their virus.
Seriously, they want open hardware, they might as well go Arduino. Same class of processor, and wildly popular.
Heck, this thing's downfall might be that it's open and NOT Arduino compatible!
Except, well, the entire population of New York would occupy the said new coastal city and those nearby, leading to New New York. I'm not so sure that's a good thing....