That doesn't happen unless the standard is accepting backwards-incompatible changes to widely-established features, which they've committed not to.
Provided you only use "widely-established" features. Which ones are those, specifically? Because they certainly have not made any commitment to reject backwards-incompatible features in general. Quite the opposite: they make it very clear that if they decide something is "broken", they will change it without warning. Hope you weren't relying on that "broken" behaviour.
Or, you can do what I did, and buy a wi-fi only handheld device and use your regular phone
Which is totally useless if the reason you are interested in a smartphone is so you can, I dunno, use the internet everywhere or something. Maybe you live in some magical land with free wifi everywhere and you never go travelling at all, but most of us aren't so lucky.
Do you really want to have to run to an AC outlet as soon as the plane lands so you can make a call just because you wanted to watch two movies on a cross-country flight?
You watch movies on your phone? How strange. Most of us use the movie-watching device handily built into the seat in front, or a laptop if we want to bring our own.
There is power in being a consumer
Yeah, like there's power in being a voter. But I don't see many supporters of minority parties celebrating because their interests are being represented in Congress.
I know what you mean -- these are critically important issues. How could anyone be expected to use a browser with a close button on its status bar?! I'd switch to Chrome like a shot, but its icon is the wrong color.
I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!" at this stage of the game
I guess you don't visit Slashdot on a netbook then. I'm getting pretty tired of Firefox locking up completely for half a minute every time I open a story.
Of course, that isn't entirely the browser's fault.
Ultima Underworld shipped a full year before Doom, ran on lesser hardware, and had a more advanced engine.
"More advanced engine" is debatable. It had nice things like 3D objects and the ability to look up and down, but the maps were tile-based (where Doom allowed arbitrary geometry in a 2D plane), and the draw distance was very limited (where Doom could render right up to the limit of the screen resolution).
Even what I believe was the last iteration of the Underworld engine, in System Shock, was still fundamentally tile-based and only had very limited support for non-orthogonal walls, though it was again very advanced in other ways (dynamic lighting, rather good physics for the era, and unusual support for high resolution graphics).
it was also top down 2D so your characters _really_ looked the way you wanted them to look, the encounters were top down 2D so the enemies _really_ looked as frightening and gruesome as you wanted them to look, the battles were not movie quality full-motion video so you could imagine your spellcasting and imagine the impacts and imagine the blow by blow the way you wanted to imagine it.
One hears this argument a lot and it is bullshit. If crap graphics are better because they leave more to your imagination, should it not also follow that a game like Doom is better than one with a complex storyline because it leaves the plot to your imagination? If you can't cope with seeing what the characters look like, how do you ever manage to put up with being told what they say and do?
Yeah, and last FF4 beta I tried it was bloody annoying, being assigned to an unchangeable keyboard shortcut that I kept hitting by accident while typing. After the third time I managed to lose data without knowing how I'd done it, I gave up and went back to FF3. Hopefully there'll be extensions to change the keyboard mapping by now...
Do you seriously think that even 0.0001% of Firefox users have "typical workflows" that rely on "practical, explicit information" about whether the browser is currently performing a DNS lookup or negotiating an HTTP connection?!
This COULD have been fixed with a simple config option though. Why that wasn't made available is beyond me.
Translation: "I think the Firefox source code should be made even more bloated, just so that a handful of change haters don't have to install a simple extension."
Rearranging things like this is like rearranging the pedals in a car.
Good analogy. Minor UI adjustments do very often lead to accidents causing tens of thousands of dollars' worht of damage, serious injury, and even death. I think Mozilla should be hauled into court to face criminal charges for recklessly endangering their users like this.
Seriously, though, give it a month and I bet you won't even notice the change any more. If you've coped with moving from DOS and 1993-vintage UNIX to modern GUIs, you are adaptable enough to cope with the URL preview moving to the URL bar.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
The FF3 Awesome Bar "disaster" consisted of a bunch of people who hate change whining about a change. Then after a month or so they got used to it, and after a few more months all but the most hardcore haters were wondering how they ever got by without it.
I know because I was one of them. I may even have complained about it here and demanded a config option. Now I rely on the feature every day. If the Awesome Bar taught me one thing, it is to reserve judgement until I've had a chance to try a feature out properly for myself.
"Monopoly" does not mean "something Slashdot does not like". It means a market where one player dominates to such an extent that they effectively control all sales. Amazon does not control sales of anything, least of all Android apps; therefore, by definition, nothing Amazon does can be considered monopolistic.
The Android marketplace is pretty bad actually. It is very hard to find things in it; there is no quality control; user rankings are notoriously unreliable and do not give any useful indication of whether a given app is good or bad. I, for one, will be investigating Amazon's app store to see whether it provides a better way to find good apps.
The game is played reasonably fairly: that is to say, the computer and the humans receive the input at exactly the same time, parse it as quickly as they can, and try to be ready with an answer in time to hit their buzzer switch first.
It does appear that the computer may be receiving the input in digital form rather than being forced to read it from the same screen as the humans, which might be considered slightly unfair; but nobody considers reading to be a fundamental part of what makes Jeopardy what it is, and this is supposed to be a test of the computer's Jeopardy-playing ability, not its OCR ability.
Passwords, yes. But there is a good reason to keep passwords short: one has to type them in regularly. Wifi passphrases are things one generally only ever types in once,* so there is no reason not to make them as long as the OS will allow. Mine is over 40 characters long; it has some structure in order to be memorable, but I don't think anyone will brute force it in the near future.
* Or twice, if you are using an obsolete and poorly designed operating system.
OK, so you have shifted the impossibly high entry barrier from the browser to the OS. Now nobody can make a new OS to compete with the big guys. Moving the barrier doesn't make it go away. It is still a barrier and it still impedes innovation.
The height of "openness" and freedom to me is the ability for me, as the user, to CHOOSE whatever format I want to watch or use for myself.
Really? I think you'll find yourself in a tiny minority, as most users don't even realise there is more than one video codec available, let alone care which is used.
OTOH, quite a lot of people do care about having the choice to use whichever web browser they want; and since very popular browsers such as Firefox cannot easily implement H.264, it is clearly beneficial to this more relevant choice issue for the web to standardise on a format that does not require the imposition of choice-limiting licensing restrictions.
Releasing the originals is kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.
In other news, the British government has announced that Stonehenge is to be demolished and replaced with a remastered version that better reflects the original vision of the ancient Britons. "To be honest, these stones have not really stood the test of time," said a spokesman. "Half of them have fallen over and the rest are terribly weathered. The remastered Stonehenge will feature sharper edges and exciting new visual effects every solstice."
Honestly, I don't care who shoots first in the version of the movie that plays if you just stick the disk in the drive. I don't even care whether the revised versions are "better" or "worse". But this deliberate attempt to prevent people from seeing the original, historical, culturally significant versions of these movies is simply vandalism.
In reality, most of those other apps could be used just fine with a seamless rdesktop or Citrix connection to a single Windows server. You may need Windows, but that doesn't mean you need it on every desk.
Many large organisations already use Citrix to access niche applications like this, instead of buying a license for every single desktop that might ever need to access them. Switching the underlying desktop to Linux is an option, and any public company that rules it out without even considering it is not doing their duty to their shareholders.
Sure, Python is a nicer language for writing modern programs in. But the cult-like fervor that many Python advocates tend to adopt, particularly whenever the subject of learning programming comes up, is frankly rather disturbing -- and certainly not something I would want any child of mine to be exposed to in an educational environment.
No sanely designed programming language will ever require you to label each line of code and throw and require the lines to be renumbered whenever you want to put new code in the middle.
Line numbering is actually not a bad way of introducing programming. It models a program as an explicit list of instructions, which is a decent metaphor for very simple programs.
Contrast something like Python, where the student is forced to worry about things like indentation before he even knows what a loop is, or Java, where the student is forced to copy huge chunks of class definition boilerplate before she has even grasped the concept of a variable.
I will agree that BASIC of the classic line-numbered sort is not suitable for learning to write real-world programs. But as a way to learn the basic concepts, it is arguably superior to "better" languages, precisely because it does not force you to learn about the structure of real programs just to make your computer do something interesting.
(Someone is about to point out that "hello world" in Python is a one-liner. Don't bother. "Hello world" is not a useful learning experience in the way that "20 GOTO 10" is.)
Slashdot Mirror
Provided you only use "widely-established" features. Which ones are those, specifically? Because they certainly have not made any commitment to reject backwards-incompatible features in general. Quite the opposite: they make it very clear that if they decide something is "broken", they will change it without warning. Hope you weren't relying on that "broken" behaviour.
I admire your faith in humanity.
Which is totally useless if the reason you are interested in a smartphone is so you can, I dunno, use the internet everywhere or something. Maybe you live in some magical land with free wifi everywhere and you never go travelling at all, but most of us aren't so lucky.
You watch movies on your phone? How strange. Most of us use the movie-watching device handily built into the seat in front, or a laptop if we want to bring our own.
Yeah, like there's power in being a voter. But I don't see many supporters of minority parties celebrating because their interests are being represented in Congress.
I know what you mean -- these are critically important issues. How could anyone be expected to use a browser with a close button on its status bar?! I'd switch to Chrome like a shot, but its icon is the wrong color.
I guess you don't visit Slashdot on a netbook then. I'm getting pretty tired of Firefox locking up completely for half a minute every time I open a story.
Of course, that isn't entirely the browser's fault.
"More advanced engine" is debatable. It had nice things like 3D objects and the ability to look up and down, but the maps were tile-based (where Doom allowed arbitrary geometry in a 2D plane), and the draw distance was very limited (where Doom could render right up to the limit of the screen resolution).
Even what I believe was the last iteration of the Underworld engine, in System Shock, was still fundamentally tile-based and only had very limited support for non-orthogonal walls, though it was again very advanced in other ways (dynamic lighting, rather good physics for the era, and unusual support for high resolution graphics).
Unfortunately for non-Windows-users, your opinion is not widely shared among people who are actually paid to make games.
One hears this argument a lot and it is bullshit. If crap graphics are better because they leave more to your imagination, should it not also follow that a game like Doom is better than one with a complex storyline because it leaves the plot to your imagination? If you can't cope with seeing what the characters look like, how do you ever manage to put up with being told what they say and do?
Yeah, and last FF4 beta I tried it was bloody annoying, being assigned to an unchangeable keyboard shortcut that I kept hitting by accident while typing. After the third time I managed to lose data without knowing how I'd done it, I gave up and went back to FF3. Hopefully there'll be extensions to change the keyboard mapping by now ...
Yeah, I can't believe it won't work on my Mac LC II either. Why doesn't System 7 get any love? :(
Do you seriously think that even 0.0001% of Firefox users have "typical workflows" that rely on "practical, explicit information" about whether the browser is currently performing a DNS lookup or negotiating an HTTP connection?!
Wow.
Translation: "I think the Firefox source code should be made even more bloated, just so that a handful of change haters don't have to install a simple extension."
Really, you think that makes sense?
But then you can't see where links lead when you hover over them.
Which is fine, because the only thing it was ever useful for is seeing where links lead, and that job has been taken over by something else.
(2), since it gets rid of a largely useless UI element and streamlines the interface.
Next question?
Good analogy. Minor UI adjustments do very often lead to accidents causing tens of thousands of dollars' worht of damage, serious injury, and even death. I think Mozilla should be hauled into court to face criminal charges for recklessly endangering their users like this.
Seriously, though, give it a month and I bet you won't even notice the change any more. If you've coped with moving from DOS and 1993-vintage UNIX to modern GUIs, you are adaptable enough to cope with the URL preview moving to the URL bar.
The FF3 Awesome Bar "disaster" consisted of a bunch of people who hate change whining about a change. Then after a month or so they got used to it, and after a few more months all but the most hardcore haters were wondering how they ever got by without it.
I know because I was one of them. I may even have complained about it here and demanded a config option. Now I rely on the feature every day. If the Awesome Bar taught me one thing, it is to reserve judgement until I've had a chance to try a feature out properly for myself.
"Monopoly" does not mean "something Slashdot does not like". It means a market where one player dominates to such an extent that they effectively control all sales. Amazon does not control sales of anything, least of all Android apps; therefore, by definition, nothing Amazon does can be considered monopolistic.
The Android marketplace is pretty bad actually. It is very hard to find things in it; there is no quality control; user rankings are notoriously unreliable and do not give any useful indication of whether a given app is good or bad. I, for one, will be investigating Amazon's app store to see whether it provides a better way to find good apps.
The game is played reasonably fairly: that is to say, the computer and the humans receive the input at exactly the same time, parse it as quickly as they can, and try to be ready with an answer in time to hit their buzzer switch first.
It does appear that the computer may be receiving the input in digital form rather than being forced to read it from the same screen as the humans, which might be considered slightly unfair; but nobody considers reading to be a fundamental part of what makes Jeopardy what it is, and this is supposed to be a test of the computer's Jeopardy-playing ability, not its OCR ability.
Passwords, yes. But there is a good reason to keep passwords short: one has to type them in regularly. Wifi passphrases are things one generally only ever types in once,* so there is no reason not to make them as long as the OS will allow. Mine is over 40 characters long; it has some structure in order to be memorable, but I don't think anyone will brute force it in the near future.
* Or twice, if you are using an obsolete and poorly designed operating system.
OK, so you have shifted the impossibly high entry barrier from the browser to the OS. Now nobody can make a new OS to compete with the big guys. Moving the barrier doesn't make it go away. It is still a barrier and it still impedes innovation.
Really? I think you'll find yourself in a tiny minority, as most users don't even realise there is more than one video codec available, let alone care which is used.
OTOH, quite a lot of people do care about having the choice to use whichever web browser they want; and since very popular browsers such as Firefox cannot easily implement H.264, it is clearly beneficial to this more relevant choice issue for the web to standardise on a format that does not require the imposition of choice-limiting licensing restrictions.
That's four to start with.
In other news, the British government has announced that Stonehenge is to be demolished and replaced with a remastered version that better reflects the original vision of the ancient Britons. "To be honest, these stones have not really stood the test of time," said a spokesman. "Half of them have fallen over and the rest are terribly weathered. The remastered Stonehenge will feature sharper edges and exciting new visual effects every solstice."
Honestly, I don't care who shoots first in the version of the movie that plays if you just stick the disk in the drive. I don't even care whether the revised versions are "better" or "worse". But this deliberate attempt to prevent people from seeing the original, historical, culturally significant versions of these movies is simply vandalism.
Wow, defensive much?
In reality, most of those other apps could be used just fine with a seamless rdesktop or Citrix connection to a single Windows server. You may need Windows, but that doesn't mean you need it on every desk.
Many large organisations already use Citrix to access niche applications like this, instead of buying a license for every single desktop that might ever need to access them. Switching the underlying desktop to Linux is an option, and any public company that rules it out without even considering it is not doing their duty to their shareholders.
BASIC has one important advantage over Python.
BASIC is not a religion.
Sure, Python is a nicer language for writing modern programs in. But the cult-like fervor that many Python advocates tend to adopt, particularly whenever the subject of learning programming comes up, is frankly rather disturbing -- and certainly not something I would want any child of mine to be exposed to in an educational environment.
Line numbering is actually not a bad way of introducing programming. It models a program as an explicit list of instructions, which is a decent metaphor for very simple programs.
Contrast something like Python, where the student is forced to worry about things like indentation before he even knows what a loop is, or Java, where the student is forced to copy huge chunks of class definition boilerplate before she has even grasped the concept of a variable.
I will agree that BASIC of the classic line-numbered sort is not suitable for learning to write real-world programs. But as a way to learn the basic concepts, it is arguably superior to "better" languages, precisely because it does not force you to learn about the structure of real programs just to make your computer do something interesting.
(Someone is about to point out that "hello world" in Python is a one-liner. Don't bother. "Hello world" is not a useful learning experience in the way that "20 GOTO 10" is.)