So what if I want to use services that aren't Google's, but I also want to be able to write my own programs for the device without having to pay the $99/year certificate tax to the publisher of the device's operating system?
So because Apple charges you $99/year, Google is a monopoly that needs to be punished by the EU?
Google, the company that actually makes its OS available open source and that you can install as Cyanogen? Google, the company that actually lets you install your apps on your device for free? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense!
They did. It was called Symbian. It was once the most widely used Smartphone OS in the world. Now it's dead.
Yes, but not because of Google. Symbian died long before Google had significant market share, for the simple reason that it sucked. It had three different UIs, each of them awful, and one of the most horrible APIs imaginable. It looked like sh*t. It missed the touch screen boat. App installation was a nightmare. Good riddance.
That's probably because somewhere in the google complex,...
The reason you can't simply provide your own implementation of GoogleMap and MapView isn't because of "bureaucrats" at Google, it's because Java doesn't support it. In Java, you have to explicitly create interfaces and factories for any part of your software system you want others to be able to replace. It sucks, but that's Java for you. Rather than creating interfaces for every single class Google guesses people might want to support, they handle it on a case-by-case basis.
however, if you want to have your device provide location services using a different library, it needs to conform to this API, and you are on your own if it breaks
Phone vendors and app developers can already easily replace mapping and location services if they want to. It requires a small amount of extra programming, but that's due to the shitty Java programming language, not anything Google did.
The only functionality that Android doesn't support is replacing some Google services with third party services in an app that wasn't designed to have those services replaced. That's a dangerous thing to do in the first place and greatly complicates support and security. And what other mobile OS allows that? Can I replace Apple's location services with Google's on iOS?
Google uses its position to make using Android without Google services increasingly more difficult.
This is different from iOS or Windows... how? It's how mobile operating systems work: people want to access services in the cloud, they want their data synced and backed up, etc.
and the OS makes no provisions to use other services as drop-in replacements (i.e. transparently to other apps)
There are tons of things you can replace, far more than on other mobile operating systems. Android even provides for using non-Google accounts and non-Google app stores.
even though there are several other map services which could do the same thing
Like who?
but have no chance of getting the necessary OS integration.
If you want transparent substitution, all Google would have to do is add a few abstract interfaces and a factory. You claim that "there is no chance of getting the necessary OS integration". How do you know that? Has any map provider asked Google to do this and been turned down?
As far as I can tell, the reason there is no abstract Map interface is because nobody has needed or wanted it so far. And the reason Google has to do anything in the first place isn't even Google's fault, it's a limitation of the shitty Java-based system they acquired with Android.
Is Google a monopoly? When something 95% of all searches happen through Google, then, yes. When you are in a position to hinder others from entering the market and compete, certainly.
Really? How does that "hinder others from entering the market"? People use dozens of search engines every day. They happen to use Google for general web searches because it works best.
So you are saying that Google is abusing its "monopoly" on Android in order to bundle and favor Google apps and services when Samsung ships a phone based on Android that doesn't bundle Google apps and services?
Seems to me the Samsung Ace 3 is a perfect example that Google isn't doing what the EU alleges: phone vendors are free to ship Android without Google apps and services. But customers like you think the result sucks.
That shows that the reason people buy Android phones isn't actually the OS (which I personally think is pretty shitty), people buy Android phones because they actually want Google apps and services. It's not that Google is trying to leverage Android to prop up its other services, it's that Google leveraged its services to make Android a success. But because Android is free and open source to begin with, that doesn't amount to monopolistic practices.
Or maybe Google really is being more evil, and a Google monopoly really is a net loss for society.
Obviously, society would be so much better off with Nokia's shitty operating system and pay-per-search offerings from the former national phone companies of Europe!
Google makes using Android without Google difficult, and needlessly so.
No more "difficult" than using an iPhone without an Apple account or a Windows machine or Windows phone without a Microsoft account: you need an account for the app store. If that bothers you, there are plenty of phones without app stores; they are called "feature phones".
"Without Google", i.e., without the app store, you can still side-load apps on Android. Any developer can offer that. If Qando doesn't, complain to them and see what they have to say. It's their choice whether to offer a side-loaded app or not.,
You seem to want the anonymity of side-loading with the convenience of the Google-based services, and that is logically impossible.
I don't think the point was this app specifically. The point is that Google tries their hardest to make all apps depend on Google's "services".
Well, yes: Google provides web-based services, and then provides some apps to speed up access to those services from phones. You know, like the Amazon shopping app is depending on Amazon's "services" etc.
I would guess that more than half of the apps in Play could be classified as malware if you define malware as something that spreads data that the user wants to keep private.
100% of web sites could be defined as "malware" by that criterion, because they all depend on sending your data to a remote server.
And I wasn't kidding when I said I haven't seen any significant sexism (or homophobia for that matter) in the several decades I have been in the tech industry, neither among developers nor among management or customers.
As I was saying: your experience is specific to your environment: the companies you work for, the work you do, and the country you live in. Yes, sexism, racism, and homophobia are much more common in Europe and in particular among European companies, which is one reason I left Europe for the US. Your experience has no relevance to affirmative action in the US tech industry or US academia, and for you to comment on the situation in the US based on your (depressing) experience in Europe is irresponsible.
In reality, affirmative action frequently means that people insist on what they believe to be statistically equal outcomes, and that requires active discrimination.
What they identify isn't people who "troll", it's people who get mobbed and ostracized by a community. There's a big difference between the two. That's not a question of "false positives", it's a question of whether people lose themselves completely in group think.
Of course, in practice, there is little chance this will actually go anywhere. Although content creators and ideologically biased readers frequently denounce as "trolss" anybody who disagrees with them, sites actually like controversy because it increases ad impressions. That's why sites continue to use systems like Disqus, which have rather ineffective moderation.
Methane is known as a powerful greenhouse gas. Thus, it's generally assumed that releasing it into the atmosphere contributes to global warming, and all the negative effects that go with it.
And all the positive effects, like warmer temperatures and higher precipitations!
That's not natural selection, it's mate choice: women often prefer taller men, so unless there are other forces at work, tallness is selected for. Many aspects of human male bodies are likely selected for that way.
Another example of this is the size of the human penis, which is quite large compared to the human body; it's much smaller, say, in gorillas. The biological explanation is that gorilla males forcibly select their females, so mate choice doesn't have an impact, while in human populations, females generally select male mates and prefer generally more visible male sexual characteristics (up to a point).
Your assumptions are bullshit and hence your conclusions are bullshit too. For example, Python wasn't invented to replace Perl, and Ruby wasn't invented to replace Python. The people coming up with those languages had good reasons for doing so and they did ask the questions you mention, plus lots more. And the reason why half-wits like you know about any of those languages is not because "people invented them", but because there actually was "true demand" for all of them: they ended up with millions of users.
Free software operates like a free market: people come up with stuff they believe is needed, and if they were right, it succeeds. Perl, Python, and Ruby all ended up being successful, so they actually were needed. But even the many languages that failed, people generally believed they had good reasons for coming up with them, that's why they took the risks and made the investments to try to make their visions a reality. And they don't deserve your Monday morning quarterbacking.
No one cares to force the charter schools to accept all students
Overall, they don't need to be "forced", they already accept special needs students. Perhaps you are looking at the wrong charter schools. Or perhaps you have irrational expectations of the kind of education your kid should get paid for courtesy of the tax payer.
We were able to get supports for our son after years of fighting the district. Even so, we're going to head into our latest IEP meeting fearful that the supports will be removed because our son is doing well academically.
I see no justification why your kid should receive more resources than any other kid. Sure, your kid does better with more resources, but so do other kids. I think you illustrate why charter schools and portable funding are a good thing, namely to stop abuses of the system from people like you.
Slashdot Mirror
So because Apple charges you $99/year, Google is a monopoly that needs to be punished by the EU?
Google, the company that actually makes its OS available open source and that you can install as Cyanogen? Google, the company that actually lets you install your apps on your device for free? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense!
Yes, but not because of Google. Symbian died long before Google had significant market share, for the simple reason that it sucked. It had three different UIs, each of them awful, and one of the most horrible APIs imaginable. It looked like sh*t. It missed the touch screen boat. App installation was a nightmare. Good riddance.
Only if you want to use Google's online services, like the app store, backup, location service, or mapping.
The reality is that people buy Android because they want to use the Google services, not the other way around.
And if you really don't want to be linked to Google yet do want online services, buy an iPhone or a Windows phone.
The reason you can't simply provide your own implementation of GoogleMap and MapView isn't because of "bureaucrats" at Google, it's because Java doesn't support it. In Java, you have to explicitly create interfaces and factories for any part of your software system you want others to be able to replace. It sucks, but that's Java for you. Rather than creating interfaces for every single class Google guesses people might want to support, they handle it on a case-by-case basis.
Phone vendors and app developers can already easily replace mapping and location services if they want to. It requires a small amount of extra programming, but that's due to the shitty Java programming language, not anything Google did.
The only functionality that Android doesn't support is replacing some Google services with third party services in an app that wasn't designed to have those services replaced. That's a dangerous thing to do in the first place and greatly complicates support and security. And what other mobile OS allows that? Can I replace Apple's location services with Google's on iOS?
This is different from iOS or Windows... how? It's how mobile operating systems work: people want to access services in the cloud, they want their data synced and backed up, etc.
There are tons of things you can replace, far more than on other mobile operating systems. Android even provides for using non-Google accounts and non-Google app stores.
Like who?
If you want transparent substitution, all Google would have to do is add a few abstract interfaces and a factory. You claim that "there is no chance of getting the necessary OS integration". How do you know that? Has any map provider asked Google to do this and been turned down?
As far as I can tell, the reason there is no abstract Map interface is because nobody has needed or wanted it so far. And the reason Google has to do anything in the first place isn't even Google's fault, it's a limitation of the shitty Java-based system they acquired with Android.
Really? How does that "hinder others from entering the market"? People use dozens of search engines every day. They happen to use Google for general web searches because it works best.
So you are saying that Google is abusing its "monopoly" on Android in order to bundle and favor Google apps and services when Samsung ships a phone based on Android that doesn't bundle Google apps and services?
Seems to me the Samsung Ace 3 is a perfect example that Google isn't doing what the EU alleges: phone vendors are free to ship Android without Google apps and services. But customers like you think the result sucks.
That shows that the reason people buy Android phones isn't actually the OS (which I personally think is pretty shitty), people buy Android phones because they actually want Google apps and services. It's not that Google is trying to leverage Android to prop up its other services, it's that Google leveraged its services to make Android a success. But because Android is free and open source to begin with, that doesn't amount to monopolistic practices.
Obviously, society would be so much better off with Nokia's shitty operating system and pay-per-search offerings from the former national phone companies of Europe!
No more "difficult" than using an iPhone without an Apple account or a Windows machine or Windows phone without a Microsoft account: you need an account for the app store. If that bothers you, there are plenty of phones without app stores; they are called "feature phones".
"Without Google", i.e., without the app store, you can still side-load apps on Android. Any developer can offer that. If Qando doesn't, complain to them and see what they have to say. It's their choice whether to offer a side-loaded app or not.,
You seem to want the anonymity of side-loading with the convenience of the Google-based services, and that is logically impossible.
Well, yes: Google provides web-based services, and then provides some apps to speed up access to those services from phones. You know, like the Amazon shopping app is depending on Amazon's "services" etc.
100% of web sites could be defined as "malware" by that criterion, because they all depend on sending your data to a remote server.
And I wasn't kidding when I said I haven't seen any significant sexism (or homophobia for that matter) in the several decades I have been in the tech industry, neither among developers nor among management or customers.
As I was saying: your experience is specific to your environment: the companies you work for, the work you do, and the country you live in. Yes, sexism, racism, and homophobia are much more common in Europe and in particular among European companies, which is one reason I left Europe for the US. Your experience has no relevance to affirmative action in the US tech industry or US academia, and for you to comment on the situation in the US based on your (depressing) experience in Europe is irresponsible.
Even earlier than that: in his 1960's novel "The Invincible".
The concept of smart dust is much older than Pister and the 1990's. Stanislaw Lem used the idea already in the early 1960's in his stories.
Concluding that if you observe a lot of sexism around you, you must be surrounded by sexists, however, is a valid conclusion.
And the fact that you don't change the company you keep and surround yourself with different people is a reflection on you and your preferences.
That reflects more on you and the company you keep, because it hasn't been true at any of the places I have worked.
Your evidence for this being... what?
"Properly" according to who?
In reality, affirmative action frequently means that people insist on what they believe to be statistically equal outcomes, and that requires active discrimination.
What they identify isn't people who "troll", it's people who get mobbed and ostracized by a community. There's a big difference between the two. That's not a question of "false positives", it's a question of whether people lose themselves completely in group think.
Of course, in practice, there is little chance this will actually go anywhere. Although content creators and ideologically biased readers frequently denounce as "trolss" anybody who disagrees with them, sites actually like controversy because it increases ad impressions. That's why sites continue to use systems like Disqus, which have rather ineffective moderation.
Internet pre-crime.
Well, it's what the climate models predict for California:
http://www.latimes.com/science...
Of course, don't let science get in the way of your superstitions.
And all the positive effects, like warmer temperatures and higher precipitations!
That's not natural selection, it's mate choice: women often prefer taller men, so unless there are other forces at work, tallness is selected for. Many aspects of human male bodies are likely selected for that way.
Another example of this is the size of the human penis, which is quite large compared to the human body; it's much smaller, say, in gorillas. The biological explanation is that gorilla males forcibly select their females, so mate choice doesn't have an impact, while in human populations, females generally select male mates and prefer generally more visible male sexual characteristics (up to a point).
Your assumptions are bullshit and hence your conclusions are bullshit too. For example, Python wasn't invented to replace Perl, and Ruby wasn't invented to replace Python. The people coming up with those languages had good reasons for doing so and they did ask the questions you mention, plus lots more. And the reason why half-wits like you know about any of those languages is not because "people invented them", but because there actually was "true demand" for all of them: they ended up with millions of users.
Free software operates like a free market: people come up with stuff they believe is needed, and if they were right, it succeeds. Perl, Python, and Ruby all ended up being successful, so they actually were needed. But even the many languages that failed, people generally believed they had good reasons for coming up with them, that's why they took the risks and made the investments to try to make their visions a reality. And they don't deserve your Monday morning quarterbacking.
Overall, they don't need to be "forced", they already accept special needs students. Perhaps you are looking at the wrong charter schools. Or perhaps you have irrational expectations of the kind of education your kid should get paid for courtesy of the tax payer.
I see no justification why your kid should receive more resources than any other kid. Sure, your kid does better with more resources, but so do other kids. I think you illustrate why charter schools and portable funding are a good thing, namely to stop abuses of the system from people like you.
Heaven forbid you actually consider your labor a valuable, scarce resource and negotiate over it!
Apparently, you want to be treated like a disposable, interchangeable, mass-produced product instead. Well, suit yourself.