Let us consider: Microsoft is normally ridiculed for inferior products, yet frequently has dominant market share. So how is Microsoft marketing a failure?
I'd think that Microsoft is playing the "pay attention to me again! see, another release!" card, in hopes that they won't become obsolete in that computing space. Windows Mobile has been a crapfest for virtually every release, taking a GUI which really shouldn't work on a small device and shoehorning it in.
Forget openness, forget any sort of accountability. They're going to show you just enough to get you to theoretically throw down your heathen iPhones and Android devices and come home to Papa Ballmer, and then they'll abandon work on their platform. Again.
I've seen enough of Microsoft's mobile offerings and vendor lockin to know to stay the hell away from any phone with the Windows logo on it.
ith Windows Mobile, more often than not, I would get the call.. go to answer... phone locks up... reboot phone... call person back. FAIL on the basic UI of the phone. The other features would work well... just often found myself rebooting the phone when it came time to get a call.
Seconded. I've had the same issue with Winmo phones becoming unresponsive during inbound calls.
I've had a few Winmo phones over the years, most recently an HTC model and a Moto Q. Horrible, horrible phones. Not just incredibly unresponsive, but the HTC wasn't designed to be used with fingers at all.
I've also had to pull the battery out because the stupid phone didn't want to hang up before I would have to leave a voicemail message. Piece of crap phones.
I'm moving to an Android phone (which I have been using for work for quite a few months now) for myself as soon as an Android 2.x phone is available for my carrier. At least I can develop applications for it without buying into a platform (MacOS for iPhone, Windows for WinMo or Blackberry). Yes, I'm aware I could probably hack together a toolchain to develop Blackberry apps on Linux, but it would make it far more difficult.
The only significant part of Silverlight that's Windows-only is digital restrictions management on streaming video. Everything else is cloned in Moonlight.
Unfortunately the highest profile use of Silverlight for most people I know is Netflix, which makes it useless on anything other than the officially blessed versions of Silverlight.
I have been telling everyone to just get any of the cheap settop boxes that support it, but it doesn't change the argument that as long as Moonlight is "hobbled" in a way that keeps users from working with it for popular applications, it's something to be avoided rather than embraced.
No AdBlock? I've been using the Chromium version of AdBlock Plus for a few weeks now. That chromeextensions.org site has been live for quite some time.
For all those different models with different screen sizes and different input options, a developer will have more work just making sure his or her app works for the wide variety of phones.
For keyboard input, I would assume that the operating system abstracts away whether the phone has a physical or touchscreen keyboard. You have a point about the screen size, but it's not like that's a new problem in software development, so any competent interface designer and/or programmer knows how to deal with it.
Relating to screen sizes, it's not that big of a deal. It's all handled by XML layout descriptions, so you can either use relative sizing or specify different XML layouts for different screen sizes.
Once you've built your app, how do you market it on the Google app store? Do you need a license or registration to upload it? How do you upload it? Does it have to be signed or otherwise processed after it's an executing binary? How do you get paid? How do you include a GPL or other license, and the source code if required/desired?
Those details of "development" are going to be the greatest incentive, or inhibitor, to developers. Especially like me.
I recently developed an app for Android. It took a moderate amount of Java programming knowledge and a week or two to crank out a working application (working in my spare time). I figure that's a pretty resounding endorsement of the SDK.
Linux may be free, but there's no truly viable MS Office alternative, nothing that matches Exchange, there's no professional level Photoshop, there's nothing to edit videos with, nor post processing, good luck doing complex audio work
Ardour, anyone? It has been around for quite a few years, and is a really great professional grade DAW/production system. Try googling before posting something quite that ridiculous.
If you are a creative professional -- Linux is completely worthless. Sorry, but it is. I wish that were not the case, but there's no professional-level creative apps for Linux.
Of all the programs available for Linux, few are of comparable quality to those available to Windows or OSX.
That's just stupid. There are programs of poor quality on all of the major operating systems. Linux has its share of badly put-together programs, but saying that "few" are of comparable quality simply illustrates that you don't spend very much time with Linux systems or just have very poor choice in software.
Hyper-virtualisation. Running OS's under other OS's. In other words, this is a patch for Linux to make it run well on Microsoft systems, so customers will feel less need to actually install Linux on servers. It's not a friendly gesture to make normal Linux systems work better, as the title suggests.
I think I'm way more likely to virtualize *Windows* servers on a Linux host than otherwise. The company I work for doesn't run Windows on bare metal anymore.
A good reason for that is that Windows isn't really administrable via a serial console, so that if networking is blown, you'd require either an iLO/DRAC type hardware solution or would have to go with relatively costly KVM over IP.
Honestly, I don't think this is big news. The host component isn't being opensourced, so you need a Windows-whatever server to run Linux hosts under it. I think I'll stick to Xen for paravirtualization and VMware/Virtualbox for full virtualization, thank you.
Assume you buy Windows 7 for $200. You will probably get 10 years out of it.
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but you seem have a very optimistic idea of hardware life expectancy. I would assume that by the time your hardware gets old and dies in a few years, the mandatory upgrade that Microsoft will be selling will probably require buying a software upgrade to make it functional... I mean, if you bought Windows 98 ten years ago, are you still using it? I'd wager that you have bought a few upgrades since then.
If they thought you only had to buy from them once every ten years, I don't think they would be doing as well as they are now, since their model is upselling everyone on the latest and greatest version of (insert product here), whether or not you actually need any of the newer features in it.
(Disclaimer: I neither have, nor have had, for the last 10 years or so, any hardware running a Microsoft-based operating system, so YMMV.)
Couldn't you just buy an Android dev phone now and swap the SIM out of your Sprint phone?
More money up front, of course, but no contract obligation and you have root access to the phone.
Disclaimer: I haven't received my dev phone yet (it's supposed to arrive today!), so I'm not certain this will work. I'm planning to toss in the SIM card out of a Walmart Special prepaid phone I have hanging around, but that's a T-Mobile unit.
Why is that so great? How about hotmail? Would you endorse that?
Google Mail, etc, is a bit more palatable since it allows standard IMAP, SMTP, etc. I wasn't aware of hotmail supporting client access via standard protocols (although apparently they do support POP3 now).
The problem has always been the ABC shows I like, such as Lost. They won't work under Linux . ..
They barely work under Windows. Every few weeks a Windows or Firefox update or a streaming change at ABC causes ABC's player to break in new ways. Which means I've gotta google the latest problem to fix my wife's computer so she can see her stories again. It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Too bad Torrentocracy shut down. If you didn't mind the grey legal area for torrents, it grabs beautifully encoded copies of television shows without DRM, hokey flash players, or any hoop jumping at all.
The querystrings/all the get prams are still being passed, there just passed in a "visually" pleasant way for the user.
All the data is still there meaning mod_rewrite dosen't help with the "bandwidth" issue at all. It just looks pretty.
Moving persistent data to sessions is probably a better way of doing it. My guess would be that only a few things are going to be passed from one page load to another. Whether you GET or POST the data, passing it during every request is a waste of time, not to mention more difficult to sanity check everything.
It wasn't the violence I didn't like about the movie. What got me was the copious amounts of sex in that movie. Why are superheroes fucking? I can understand they were trying to display the emotion they felt towards each other, but why not convey that relationship through dialogue and actions and have the sex implied?
Because Snyder was trying to be somewhat faithful to the source material, which does indeed have "superheroes fucking." Of course, it was a bit more artful in the comic. Take it up with Alan Moore for putting sex in his work.
Not to mention, how is a child supposed to understand the whole theme of Rorschach's mother being a prostitute?
I don't think they dwelled on that as much as they had in the source material. Also, they left out everything about his landlord -- calling her out to be a whore in front of her kids was pretty cold.
How about Sally having gone back and willingly sleeping with the Comedian AFTER he tried to rape her (and knocked her around)? If a kid is old enough to understand the attempted-rape scene, but not really old enough to grasp just how fucked-up people can be, then that whole theme will confuse the hell out of him (or, worse, her) and maybe plant a terrible seed that will bloom into some warped perceptions.
Let's just accept that kids are raised with Disney-esque good and evil, and anything more complicated than that is going to be a bit of a shock to the system. Watchmen was a great comic/graphic novel, but it's not exactly something I'd expect a pre-teen to comprehend. The themes can be a bit disturbing, not to mention morally ambiguous in parts.
If you let your pre-teen wear a pair of sweatpants with ANYTHING written across the seat, or a t-shirt that says "sexpot" or similar, you are a failure as a parent.
I think Chris Rock said something like "there's no scale for being a parent, but if your daughter turns out to be a stripper, you fucked up."
Of course, this is my opinion, and I'm sure I'll get modded down and probably a hundred responses of "my partner and I let our 6 year old use the computer unsupervised and she has never looked at porn and is a polite and independent little treasure!" Great, good luck with that in another 6 years.
Nah. Putting your kid in front of *anything* unsupervised is probably a bad idea. Kids are impressionable, and it's probably a good idea not to let television raise them, otherwise you're going to end up with some pretty messed up kids.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory link: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif
Poorly prosecuted monopolistic practices?
I'd think that Microsoft is playing the "pay attention to me again! see, another release!" card, in hopes that they won't become obsolete in that computing space. Windows Mobile has been a crapfest for virtually every release, taking a GUI which really shouldn't work on a small device and shoehorning it in.
Forget openness, forget any sort of accountability. They're going to show you just enough to get you to theoretically throw down your heathen iPhones and Android devices and come home to Papa Ballmer, and then they'll abandon work on their platform. Again.
I've seen enough of Microsoft's mobile offerings and vendor lockin to know to stay the hell away from any phone with the Windows logo on it.
Almost as obligatory.
Seconded. I've had the same issue with Winmo phones becoming unresponsive during inbound calls.
I've had a few Winmo phones over the years, most recently an HTC model and a Moto Q. Horrible, horrible phones. Not just incredibly unresponsive, but the HTC wasn't designed to be used with fingers at all.
I've also had to pull the battery out because the stupid phone didn't want to hang up before I would have to leave a voicemail message. Piece of crap phones.
I'm moving to an Android phone (which I have been using for work for quite a few months now) for myself as soon as an Android 2.x phone is available for my carrier. At least I can develop applications for it without buying into a platform (MacOS for iPhone, Windows for WinMo or Blackberry). Yes, I'm aware I could probably hack together a toolchain to develop Blackberry apps on Linux, but it would make it far more difficult.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ might be what you're looking for. It's a plugin which automatically handles most mobile devices for Wordpress.
Got to love the marketing wizard who called it "wince".
The only significant part of Silverlight that's Windows-only is digital restrictions management on streaming video. Everything else is cloned in Moonlight.
Unfortunately the highest profile use of Silverlight for most people I know is Netflix, which makes it useless on anything other than the officially blessed versions of Silverlight. I have been telling everyone to just get any of the cheap settop boxes that support it, but it doesn't change the argument that as long as Moonlight is "hobbled" in a way that keeps users from working with it for popular applications, it's something to be avoided rather than embraced.
SIP for Android No custom ROM required, AFAIK.
No AdBlock? I've been using the Chromium version of AdBlock Plus for a few weeks now. That chromeextensions.org site has been live for quite some time.
For all those different models with different screen sizes and different input options, a developer will have more work just making sure his or her app works for the wide variety of phones.
For keyboard input, I would assume that the operating system abstracts away whether the phone has a physical or touchscreen keyboard. You have a point about the screen size, but it's not like that's a new problem in software development, so any competent interface designer and/or programmer knows how to deal with it.
Relating to screen sizes, it's not that big of a deal. It's all handled by XML layout descriptions, so you can either use relative sizing or specify different XML layouts for different screen sizes.
Once you've built your app, how do you market it on the Google app store? Do you need a license or registration to upload it? How do you upload it? Does it have to be signed or otherwise processed after it's an executing binary? How do you get paid? How do you include a GPL or other license, and the source code if required/desired?
Those details of "development" are going to be the greatest incentive, or inhibitor, to developers. Especially like me.
You generate a key and sign your binary. Applicable links would be : http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/app-signing.html and: http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html
I recently developed an app for Android. It took a moderate amount of Java programming knowledge and a week or two to crank out a working application (working in my spare time). I figure that's a pretty resounding endorsement of the SDK.
Ardour, anyone? It has been around for quite a few years, and is a really great professional grade DAW/production system. Try googling before posting something quite that ridiculous.
I guess all those Xara users, Ardour users, Cinelerra users, MainActor users, Blender users, VariCad users, Jahshaka/CineFX users, etc, are completely boned.
That's just stupid. There are programs of poor quality on all of the major operating systems. Linux has its share of badly put-together programs, but saying that "few" are of comparable quality simply illustrates that you don't spend very much time with Linux systems or just have very poor choice in software.
It's much like Ford did with Mercury and Lincoln.
I think the term you were looking for was rebadging.
Hyper-virtualisation. Running OS's under other OS's. In other words, this is a patch for Linux to make it run well on Microsoft systems, so customers will feel less need to actually install Linux on servers. It's not a friendly gesture to make normal Linux systems work better, as the title suggests.
I think I'm way more likely to virtualize *Windows* servers on a Linux host than otherwise. The company I work for doesn't run Windows on bare metal anymore.
A good reason for that is that Windows isn't really administrable via a serial console, so that if networking is blown, you'd require either an iLO/DRAC type hardware solution or would have to go with relatively costly KVM over IP.
Honestly, I don't think this is big news. The host component isn't being opensourced, so you need a Windows-whatever server to run Linux hosts under it. I think I'll stick to Xen for paravirtualization and VMware/Virtualbox for full virtualization, thank you.
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but you seem have a very optimistic idea of hardware life expectancy. I would assume that by the time your hardware gets old and dies in a few years, the mandatory upgrade that Microsoft will be selling will probably require buying a software upgrade to make it functional ... I mean, if you bought Windows 98 ten years ago, are you still using it? I'd wager that you have bought a few upgrades since then.
If they thought you only had to buy from them once every ten years, I don't think they would be doing as well as they are now, since their model is upselling everyone on the latest and greatest version of (insert product here), whether or not you actually need any of the newer features in it.
(Disclaimer: I neither have, nor have had, for the last 10 years or so, any hardware running a Microsoft-based operating system, so YMMV.)
Couldn't you just buy an Android dev phone now and swap the SIM out of your Sprint phone?
More money up front, of course, but no contract obligation and you have root access to the phone.
Disclaimer: I haven't received my dev phone yet (it's supposed to arrive today!), so I'm not certain this will work. I'm planning to toss in the SIM card out of a Walmart Special prepaid phone I have hanging around, but that's a T-Mobile unit.
Would work well if Sprint didn't use CDMA, which unfortunately precludes the use of SIM cards.
As does Google Sync, for the most part. And definitely across more platforms than Exchange does.
Funambol also supports some pretty aggressive syncing as well.
Google Mail, etc, is a bit more palatable since it allows standard IMAP, SMTP, etc. I wasn't aware of hotmail supporting client access via standard protocols (although apparently they do support POP3 now).
For the lazy people here, try this one: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/64572
The problem has always been the ABC shows I like, such as Lost. They won't work under Linux . . .
They barely work under Windows. Every few weeks a Windows or Firefox update or a streaming change at ABC causes ABC's player to break in new ways. Which means I've gotta google the latest problem to fix my wife's computer so she can see her stories again. It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Too bad Torrentocracy shut down. If you didn't mind the grey legal area for torrents, it grabs beautifully encoded copies of television shows without DRM, hokey flash players, or any hoop jumping at all.
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection
Anyone noticed that HDCP seems like a shortening of the word "handicap"? Wonder which moron in marketing missed that one ...
The querystrings/all the get prams are still being passed, there just passed in a "visually" pleasant way for the user. All the data is still there meaning mod_rewrite dosen't help with the "bandwidth" issue at all. It just looks pretty.
Moving persistent data to sessions is probably a better way of doing it. My guess would be that only a few things are going to be passed from one page load to another. Whether you GET or POST the data, passing it during every request is a waste of time, not to mention more difficult to sanity check everything.
It wasn't the violence I didn't like about the movie. What got me was the copious amounts of sex in that movie. Why are superheroes fucking? I can understand they were trying to display the emotion they felt towards each other, but why not convey that relationship through dialogue and actions and have the sex implied?
Because Snyder was trying to be somewhat faithful to the source material, which does indeed have "superheroes fucking." Of course, it was a bit more artful in the comic. Take it up with Alan Moore for putting sex in his work.
Not to mention, how is a child supposed to understand the whole theme of Rorschach's mother being a prostitute?
I don't think they dwelled on that as much as they had in the source material. Also, they left out everything about his landlord -- calling her out to be a whore in front of her kids was pretty cold.
How about Sally having gone back and willingly sleeping with the Comedian AFTER he tried to rape her (and knocked her around)? If a kid is old enough to understand the attempted-rape scene, but not really old enough to grasp just how fucked-up people can be, then that whole theme will confuse the hell out of him (or, worse, her) and maybe plant a terrible seed that will bloom into some warped perceptions.
Let's just accept that kids are raised with Disney-esque good and evil, and anything more complicated than that is going to be a bit of a shock to the system. Watchmen was a great comic/graphic novel, but it's not exactly something I'd expect a pre-teen to comprehend. The themes can be a bit disturbing, not to mention morally ambiguous in parts.
If you let your pre-teen wear a pair of sweatpants with ANYTHING written across the seat, or a t-shirt that says "sexpot" or similar, you are a failure as a parent.
I think Chris Rock said something like "there's no scale for being a parent, but if your daughter turns out to be a stripper, you fucked up."
Of course, this is my opinion, and I'm sure I'll get modded down and probably a hundred responses of "my partner and I let our 6 year old use the computer unsupervised and she has never looked at porn and is a polite and independent little treasure!" Great, good luck with that in another 6 years.
Nah. Putting your kid in front of *anything* unsupervised is probably a bad idea. Kids are impressionable, and it's probably a good idea not to let television raise them, otherwise you're going to end up with some pretty messed up kids.