I've read reports where people have narrowed at least some battery churn to a buggy IMAP implementation when working with Google Mail. Maybe it's the GMail server doing something unexpected, but that's still a client bug. Others point at NFC. I haven't used WP8 yet to check.
Um, can't you see a pattern here: somebody fresh on Slashdot starts posting and quickly exposes opinions that are insufficiently anti-Microsoft. He gets barked at by a few zealots who point out his high UID as something that makes him deficient (I mean six digits, must be a total bandwagon jumper), then he gets modded down regardless of the validity of his comment. The person shrugs and leaves it to the neckbeards.
If that's what the majority of people here actually wants, fine. But then the motto should be "News for Linux neckbeards. Other stuff doesn't matter."
As far as I can observe, the general attitude there is that programmers are dispensable code monkeys who don't know much, but will try to do the job in any way they can, and the way to run projects is to get a few shovel loads of them and ensure that some formal checks are passed in the end. Code quality is nobody's concern.
The programmers, on their part, largely match this bracket. There is a whole culture of getting "educated" to check correct answers in tests and collect certificates. An engineering job is seen as a preferred avenue to success, before the mandatory step of crossing over to management, no matter where your real talents lay. A 40 year old techie is a loser, because otherwise he would be a manager.
No, just an software repository with open source libraries and applications. In Linux this is a none-issue and Linux do not have any guidelines or any other restrictions.
Everyone is using the libraries of the system because it's a) easier then to maintain your own copy of the library and b) you get more users if your software is in the repository.
Also, you get pilloried if you ever break the ABI of a library in the repository without changing the soname. So everybody learns to play nice and keep backward compatibility, package older versions for legacy applications, and so on. But it used to be much worse: I remember when a zlib vulnerability was discovered, a symbol name search through a repository shown it to be replicated in 20 or so statically linked copies in various packages, all of which needed to be patched ASAP. No wonder why Fedora is adamant on reducing the number of library clones.
Nokia has always prided itself on delivering an experience of software AND hardware.
I don't know what software you are talking about, but the software I've seen before Elop started shaking things over wasn't something to be much proud of. This is perhaps the biggest reason why did they end up in their current position.
It's probably of consequence of first getting into the DLL hell, and then facilitating a "culture" of solving it in a way that defeated the purpose, with each application bringing copies of ostensibly common DLLs into its own installation. Later, Microsoft created a more intelligent solution with SxS. It's a bit of how Unix shared libraries are installed side by side and differentiated by sonames, except there was no pressure of trying to assert a stable ABI between two library builds (in SxS the full version number is used as a search key). The result is that there are still way too many DLL copies installed, which are not really all different in ABI and behavior. And still a lot of third-party developers do the dumb bring-you-own-DLLs thing because it works best for them, the tragedy of commons notwithstanding, and there is no way to enforce less wasteful software distribution policies because there is no control over what an application installer can do.
To think of it, this is where a curated marketplace with strict acceptance guidelines might actually help.
Please elaborate. What Windows 8 phones does Lumia 920 differentiate itself from?
Any that don't have optical image stabilization in the camera, the touchscreen usable with gloves on, decent screen visibility in direct sunlight, sub-10ms screen reaction times, wireless charging, ability to withstand accidental drops from human-sized heights without a case, and Nokia exclusive apps. It's actually differentiation overkill: Lumia 920 has distinct features over any smartphone available on the market, no matter what the OS.
Then Google Maps for Android is definitely a userland software written to work on Android/Linux.
It won't work on mainstream Linux, unless there's the whole Android platform environment. Which nobody will provide for mainstream Linux because of differences in how it works with the kernel and possibly some library forking on the userland side as well.
The situation is even worse when device drivers are considered. Now, the hardware manufacturers and driver writers from the community are saddled with a choice: should they write their drivers for Android, for mainline Linux, or for both? Some of them would only target Android, thereby further fragmenting the code base.
The Linux community is taking steps to merge the Android fork, but this isn't a healthy development: for the first time, one company gets the influence to throw their changes over the wall and have the community pick them up, regardless of how harmonized they are with other usage profiles for the kernel.
Let's put this really simply. If you have an app and you want people to run it, you have a choice of binary formats to put it in. If you put it out in Android's binary format, it will run on "75%" of the new phones sold this year (I'd guess 65% actually).
... and compete for users' attention with 100 other apps serving exactly the same need.
If you have an original idea/service, it might make sense to target iOS and Android first. Otherwise, opportunities might be better on Windows Phone. Filling up the application gap is only a matter of time, after which it's just another mobile platform to target if you want to add 10-20% to your user base.
However, I think that the fear is that Microsoft will put out a phone with a *more powerful* processor and/or a *higher resolution* display than they allow the other Windows Phone licensees to, thus ensuring that no OEM can match Microsoft's top-of-the-line phone.
Moar, highar. Meh. I don't think Nokia is that into spec chasers' stupid money. They seem to differentiate on style, build quality, camera, and exclusive apps, none of which is impossible with the specs they can get now. The screen on the Lumia 920 is more than adequate, and I haven't heard complaints about the speed, either.
We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps.
So like... 1/10th of the number of apps both iOS and Android accrued in shorter time, and already surpassed by WP 7.5?
Face it, development for Symbian was pain and tears. Qt relieved it, but only to an extent. I was around when they were trying to design Qt Mobility APIs around both S60's existing APIs and various Nokia managers with requirement lists apparently thought up in bouts of Powerpoint creativity. It's good luck that most of that shit will die off because nobody in the right mind will want to implement or use it anywhere else.
Yeah, let's carefully pick our examples. This passage actually speaks against Symbian: it shows that even a code monkey with little skills can develop and submit an app for a modern mobile OS. But let's lament the old expertocracy, where one could feel special for learning a lot of platform quirks that you must have known in order to make your oh-so-serious application work.
And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.
Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot.
I must apologize: I was confused by Slashdot's ever-helpful layout and mistook a neighboring comment of the obligatory AC on a witch hunt for insufficiently anti-Microsoft opinions (the comment he responded to was already modded down, of course), thinking it to be a reply to the thread starter.
Difference is that Android phones can actually differentiate themselves. Microsoft phones have very little latitude in hardware design, so there is next to no difference between phone A and phone B.
Hey, here at Slashdot we are not spoiling a good Nokia bashing submission with boring facts. And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.
I meant all userland software written to work on Linux. All distribution kernels work the same way to userland as the mainline kernel of the same version. Moreover, they work the same way with third-party modules, taking into account configuration differences. There are no quirky features like wakelocks to be aware of.
It's getting worse. Finnair has stopped offering free food on short haul flights, and they are in a battle with the unions to reduce their staff costs, too. The lowest bidders such as Norwegian and Flybe are expanding, though.
Even the cheapest Lumias are £160. You can get an Android smartphone for half that.
Will it be crap? You betcha. But it's a big step up from the feature phones going at the same price, in terms of apps.
I suspect it's a crapshoot in terms of which Android apps would actually run well on such phones. With an Asha, at least you can be sure the apps are written for the specs.
I would expect him to say nothing, he didn't. He should be having a team working secretly somewhere to be ready to respond to a Microsoft announcement of a launch Phone with "People loved out Lumia range range, but wanted Android on it. This is out new range of Fuck-You-Ballmer Phones"
I suspect the real team effort, and the real response, will amount to "People loved our Lumia range, never mind that some neckbeards wanted Android on it. This is our new range of Thanks-Ballmer-Nice-Try Phones".
Nah, I can point at many true Linux kernels from distributions, all of which run Linux userspace nearly interchangeably, and even maintain source-level compatibility between them to drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
they left us with a December.
It sounds as if you can't expect much robustness from smartphones these days, can you?
I've read reports where people have narrowed at least some battery churn to a buggy IMAP implementation when working with Google Mail. Maybe it's the GMail server doing something unexpected, but that's still a client bug.
Others point at NFC. I haven't used WP8 yet to check.
Um, can't you see a pattern here: somebody fresh on Slashdot starts posting and quickly exposes opinions that are insufficiently anti-Microsoft. He gets barked at by a few zealots who point out his high UID as something that makes him deficient (I mean six digits, must be a total bandwagon jumper), then he gets modded down regardless of the validity of his comment. The person shrugs and leaves it to the neckbeards.
If that's what the majority of people here actually wants, fine. But then the motto should be "News for Linux neckbeards. Other stuff doesn't matter."
As far as I can observe, the general attitude there is that programmers are dispensable code monkeys who don't know much, but will try to do the job in any way they can, and the way to run projects is to get a few shovel loads of them and ensure that some formal checks are passed in the end. Code quality is nobody's concern.
The programmers, on their part, largely match this bracket. There is a whole culture of getting "educated" to check correct answers in tests and collect certificates. An engineering job is seen as a preferred avenue to success, before the mandatory step of crossing over to management, no matter where your real talents lay. A 40 year old techie is a loser, because otherwise he would be a manager.
Yeah, let's all read the latest word (or more like 10000) from Tomi Ahonen instead... You must be new here.
Hey, it's just working as designed: not to let malware any chance to get scheduled for CPU and I/O.
No, just an software repository with open source libraries and applications. In Linux this is a none-issue and Linux do not have any guidelines or any other restrictions.
Well, Fedora apparently does.
Everyone is using the libraries of the system because it's a) easier then to maintain your own copy of the library and b) you get more users if your software is in the repository.
Also, you get pilloried if you ever break the ABI of a library in the repository without changing the soname. So everybody learns to play nice and keep backward compatibility, package older versions for legacy applications, and so on.
But it used to be much worse: I remember when a zlib vulnerability was discovered, a symbol name search through a repository shown it to be replicated in 20 or so statically linked copies in various packages, all of which needed to be patched ASAP. No wonder why Fedora is adamant on reducing the number of library clones.
Nokia has always prided itself on delivering an experience of software AND hardware.
I don't know what software you are talking about, but the software I've seen before Elop started shaking things over wasn't something to be much proud of. This is perhaps the biggest reason why did they end up in their current position.
Oh, and frost pisst.
It's probably of consequence of first getting into the DLL hell, and then facilitating a "culture" of solving it in a way that defeated the purpose, with each application bringing copies of ostensibly common DLLs into its own installation. Later, Microsoft created a more intelligent solution with SxS. It's a bit of how Unix shared libraries are installed side by side and differentiated by sonames, except there was no pressure of trying to assert a stable ABI between two library builds (in SxS the full version number is used as a search key). The result is that there are still way too many DLL copies installed, which are not really all different in ABI and behavior. And still a lot of third-party developers do the dumb bring-you-own-DLLs thing because it works best for them, the tragedy of commons notwithstanding, and there is no way to enforce less wasteful software distribution policies because there is no control over what an application installer can do.
To think of it, this is where a curated marketplace with strict acceptance guidelines might actually help.
Please elaborate. What Windows 8 phones does Lumia 920 differentiate itself from?
Any that don't have optical image stabilization in the camera, the touchscreen usable with gloves on, decent screen visibility in direct sunlight, sub-10ms screen reaction times, wireless charging, ability to withstand accidental drops from human-sized heights without a case, and Nokia exclusive apps. It's actually differentiation overkill: Lumia 920 has distinct features over any smartphone available on the market, no matter what the OS.
You forgot that you were saying Android is not Linux.
"Android software won't work on a mainline Linux kernel" == "it's not Linux".
Anyway, what IS mainstream Linux? My TV runs a very small kernel, from Linux 2.4 . Is it mainstream?
Yes, if you can, in principle, run Linux userland programs on it without source changes.
Then Google Maps for Android is definitely a userland software written to work on Android/Linux.
It won't work on mainstream Linux, unless there's the whole Android platform environment. Which nobody will provide for mainstream Linux because of differences in how it works with the kernel and possibly some library forking on the userland side as well.
The situation is even worse when device drivers are considered. Now, the hardware manufacturers and driver writers from the community are saddled with a choice: should they write their drivers for Android, for mainline Linux, or for both? Some of them would only target Android, thereby further fragmenting the code base.
The Linux community is taking steps to merge the Android fork, but this isn't a healthy development: for the first time, one company gets the influence to throw their changes over the wall and have the community pick them up, regardless of how harmonized they are with other usage profiles for the kernel.
What does that have to do with hardware differentiation?
Let's put this really simply. If you have an app and you want people to run it, you have a choice of binary formats to put it in. If you put it out in Android's binary format, it will run on "75%" of the new phones sold this year (I'd guess 65% actually).
... and compete for users' attention with 100 other apps serving exactly the same need.
If you have an original idea/service, it might make sense to target iOS and Android first. Otherwise, opportunities might be better on Windows Phone. Filling up the application gap is only a matter of time, after which it's just another mobile platform to target if you want to add 10-20% to your user base.
However, I think that the fear is that Microsoft will put out a phone with a *more powerful* processor and/or a *higher resolution* display than they allow the other Windows Phone licensees to, thus ensuring that no OEM can match Microsoft's top-of-the-line phone.
Moar, highar. Meh.
I don't think Nokia is that into spec chasers' stupid money. They seem to differentiate on style, build quality, camera, and exclusive apps, none of which is impossible with the specs they can get now. The screen on the Lumia 920 is more than adequate, and I haven't heard complaints about the speed, either.
We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps.
So like... 1/10th of the number of apps both iOS and Android accrued in shorter time, and already surpassed by WP 7.5?
Face it, development for Symbian was pain and tears. Qt relieved it, but only to an extent. I was around when they were trying to design Qt Mobility APIs around both S60's existing APIs and various Nokia managers with requirement lists apparently thought up in bouts of Powerpoint creativity. It's good luck that most of that shit will die off because nobody in the right mind will want to implement or use it anywhere else.
We should never mention that most of the "Apps" were actually applications as opposed to 90% being frontends for someone's blog or pictures of food and multi-lingual fart apps.
Yeah, let's carefully pick our examples. This passage actually speaks against Symbian: it shows that even a code monkey with little skills can develop and submit an app for a modern mobile OS. But let's lament the old expertocracy, where one could feel special for learning a lot of platform quirks that you must have known in order to make your oh-so-serious application work.
And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.
Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot.
I must apologize: I was confused by Slashdot's ever-helpful layout and mistook a neighboring comment of the obligatory AC on a witch hunt for insufficiently anti-Microsoft opinions (the comment he responded to was already modded down, of course), thinking it to be a reply to the thread starter.
Difference is that Android phones can actually differentiate themselves. Microsoft phones have very little latitude in hardware design, so there is next to no difference between phone A and phone B.
A Lumia 920 says "bullshit" to that.
Hey, here at Slashdot we are not spoiling a good Nokia bashing submission with boring facts.
And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.
I meant all userland software written to work on Linux. All distribution kernels work the same way to userland as the mainline kernel of the same version. Moreover, they work the same way with third-party modules, taking into account configuration differences. There are no quirky features like wakelocks to be aware of.
It's getting worse. Finnair has stopped offering free food on short haul flights, and they are in a battle with the unions to reduce their staff costs, too. The lowest bidders such as Norwegian and Flybe are expanding, though.
Even the cheapest Lumias are £160. You can get an Android smartphone for half that.
Will it be crap? You betcha. But it's a big step up from the feature phones going at the same price, in terms of apps.
I suspect it's a crapshoot in terms of which Android apps would actually run well on such phones. With an Asha, at least you can be sure the apps are written for the specs.
I would expect him to say nothing, he didn't. He should be having a team working secretly somewhere to be ready to respond to a Microsoft announcement of a launch Phone with "People loved out Lumia range range, but wanted Android on it. This is out new range of Fuck-You-Ballmer Phones"
I suspect the real team effort, and the real response, will amount to "People loved our Lumia range, never mind that some neckbeards wanted Android on it. This is our new range of Thanks-Ballmer-Nice-Try Phones".
What are you trying to say with that? It's a clever sounding term to parrot, sure, but I don't think its meaning applies to this case.
Nah, I can point at many true Linux kernels from distributions, all of which run Linux userspace nearly interchangeably, and even maintain source-level compatibility between them to drivers.