When we get to that point, then sound the alarm. As it is, we're not there yet.
Sure we are. OS upgrades occasionally break compatibility with apps. If no further updates are going to be made available for the app because it's been blocked from the Market, and an OS upgrade makes the app start crashing, then that's that.
If you ever have to do a factory reset of your phone, you'll also lose the app, because if it's removed from the Android Market then it's removed from your app account. Normally you could even buy a new phone or tablet and the Android apps you've bought would be automatically pushed to the new device when you register with your Google account. That won't happen now.
Day after the Wal-Mart decision at SCOTUS -- think it got through to the Winkies that SCOTUS is a deep friend of wealthy established multi-billion $ corporate entities? Young Winki, you chose wisely.
Why wisely? Sure, they might spend another half-mil trying to push the case up to SCOTUS, and then they might lose. And what then? They'd basically be right where they are now, minus the half-mil. If you've already won the lottery to the tune of $65 million, why wouldn't you buy one more ticket, just to see?
Of course, TFA is about the new Galaxy Tab, which has a bigger screen.
My problem even with the bigger screen, though, is that it has the widescreen form factor, unlike the iPad. It's probably great for watching widescreen movies, but I never do that on a tablet. So as it stands, the onscreen keyboard takes up too much space in landscape (sideways) mode, and the screen feels too long and skinny when in portrait mode. The iPad's screen is more balanced.
And yet, Objective-C keeps climbing on the list of most popular programming languages/platforms. I highly doubt all those Objective-C developers are building Mac OS X applications.
Just to be clear, are you trying to say Google isn't offering an expensive Arduino-based kit? Because they are. I never said you had to buy it from them.
Point me a link to it. The one they handed out for free at Google I/O was manufactured by a third party, a Japanese robotics and automation specialist that has since sold out of its first run.
Lots of nerds will have fun with this, and there will be some commercial products, but it's not going to really be an important feature for consumers.
That's the nature of a development kit that includes prototyping hardware. It's for prototyping, for developers. Not only is it not going to be "an important feature" for consumers, the ADK is not aimed at consumers at all. It is the eventual Android Accessory-compatible devices that are developed using the ADK that will be marketed to consumers.
The only story here (which is by no means new) is that Google has an expensive Arduino kit available as an official add-on to Android.
No. What they have is a completely open reference prototyping platform for building Android accessories, which is based on Arduino. The Arduino platform is itself open, and Google has made every part of the ADK available free of charge under permissive open source licenses, right down to the schematics for the prototyping platform. A number of vendors manufacture the prototyping units, but you don't have to buy them. If you have the know-how, you could build the kit yourself from components. Also, any accessory you invent does not necessarily have to include all of the components found on the prototyping board. The kit includes things like temperature and light sensors, buttons, LEDs, and servo motors. It's easy to imagine devices that won't need all of these things at once, so potential Android accessories could end up costing much less than the prototyping kit, especially when produced on a mass scale.
On whether Chrome will replace Firefox in Ubuntu: Not in the next year, at least. On companies wanting to own your personal data: It is a little scary. On Unity vs. Gnome 3: Clearly, some people like Unity and some really don't. On whether Canonical doesn't contribute enough to the kernel: That's not true. On why he doesn't own a smartphone: Because he hasn't bought one. Yet. On why there's no Ubuntu tablet: Unity doesn't really work as a tablet interface. On getting everyone to use free software: It will be difficult and will take a long time.
To be fair, though, too: Nobody at NASA actually predicted an accident, and the specific accident was not the result of some miscalculation (contrary to the wording of TFA). If management steamrolled over the engineers' objections, the result was that the Shuttle was less safe than it could have been. In fact, the vehicle should have been considered unsafe. What constitutes unsafe in this case? According to Richard Feynman, it was "a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate)." So even ignoring engineers' objections, the chance that the mission would go off without a hitch was still considered to be around 99 percent. By NASA's professed standards, that's not safe enough -- but to say that the accident was the result of bad management, I think, goes a little too far. Could the accident have been avoided? Certainly -- there were 99 out of 100 things that could have happened that would have prevented the accident, instead of what actually did happen. And if they reduced the chance of failure to one-half of one percent, there would have been slightly more than 99 out of 100 outcomes where nothing would have failed, and so on. Could "standing up for what you believe in" have prevented the accident with 100 percent certainty? Only with the crystal clarity of hindsight.
B&N has made a big noise about the new Nook Simple Touch Reader flashing "80% less than the original Nook." Apparently it now only flashes about once every five pages instead of every page, according to reviews. Personally, I don't find the flashes all that annoying at all in practice. They might seem annoying when you're just fooling around with the device in the store, pressing buttons and trying to see what it can do, but when you're actually reading a book you stop noticing it pretty quickly.
It amazes me how the whole computing community, including computer scientists and programmers, are being kept hostage by a small group of people who enforce their rules upon them (not only the Microsofts, Apples and Adobes of this world, but also standardization committees such as W3C).
So you don't want a single company in control, but you don't want open standards either. You must really be a masochist if you think everybody should constantly re-invent everything themselves.
So, unless she was very clumsy, or unless the theater was layed out in a very strange way, or unless one of the patrons was looking backwards (rather than at the movie), there's no way she should have shone her flashlight directly into the eyes of other patrons.
Doesn't change the fact that this is an extremely annoying thing to do. You don't have to shine a flashlight "directly into my eyes" for me to see you using a flashlight in a darkened movie theater. I carry an actual flashlight in my pocket, and I'm not dumb enough to use it while a movie is running. I doubt most phone-addicted people would, either. So why is it they think using their phone screen as a flashlight -- when the screen is much bigger than the lens of most flashlights -- is any better?
Your ideas intrigue me (and I was considering subscribing to your newsletter), so I just tried it on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, running Android 3.1 with the stock browser and Adobe Flash Player 10.3.
Predictably, the Flash page-turner doesn't show up (even with plugins set to "Always On"). I get a white screen with a list of links to pages. When I click a link, it sends me a 21.25MB PDF of the report.
But I've said before that I think Flash on Android is useless, and people got all mad and said I was in Apple's pocket. I still challenge anyone to show me something useful they can do with the Flash Player installed on an Android device that they couldn't have done already.
I think that iPad does better at guessing where you actually wanted to click by looking at the "shape" of the fingerprint.
I think that's also why I like the iPhone keyboard much better than any keyboard on any Android phone I've tried. Whatever it is, Apple is doing something right.
My favourite one is how journalists, particularly TV reporters, love to talk about people being evacuated. I know it can be hard to control one's bowels when faced with extreme danger but I'm pretty sure that's not what they meant.
I like The Wire, too, but this little joke was just something they trumped up for TV. Merriam-Webster gives one definition of evacuate as: "to withdraw from a place in an organized way especially for protection." David Simon says he put it into the show as an homage to one of his copy editors who used to give him a hard time about it; nonetheless, the usage is perfectly fine.
Before the trailers there are multiple announcements (some quite amusing) that spell out very clearly that texting, talking, or using your bright-as-twenty-suns cellphone in any capacity are NOT tolerated.
In her message she says she was using her phone as a flashlight to find her seat (one of the most annoying things you can do in a theater), so chances are she came in mid-movie and didn't see the trailers or the warnings.
Perhaps his point is you don't have to use special software like Handbrake or buy special cables to use HDMI. All this stuff works out of the box on any Android tablet, including playing any format under the sun.
Since TFA is about the Galaxy Tab 10.1, I have to disabuse you of this notion. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 does not have an HDMI port. According to Samsung, "You can even share Tab content on your HDTV through the Tablet Extender feature—or stream it wirelessly with Allshare"... but I have no idea what the Tablet Extender feature is, or what Allshare is. Neither is mentioned in the product manual.
Considering it just came out on Wednesday, how have you had enough time to leave it around unused for a week?
I got mine at Google I/O in early May. The only thing I can't really speak to yet is Android 3.1 "Honeycomb." Mine came with 3.0 and only got the upgrade to 3.1 on Thursday, so it's possible things like battery life may have changed, but overall for day-to-day use the 3.1 changes seem minimal.
Keyboard: Get SwiftKey. It's much better, and you can long press for most punctuation and numbers.
To clarify, I was using the stock Samsung Keyboard that's the default when you start the machine. You can revert to the Android keyboard, which at least solves the apostrophe problem, but isn't a whole lot better. I'll look at SwiftKey. On my Android phone I use Swype.
Touchscreen: I found this for almost all touchscreen devices. Luckily, now you can just pinch-zoom in, click, pinch unzoom.
If only it was that easy. Seriously, trying to click that control is hell. Enough to frustrate a sensible person to the point that they wouldn't use that device anymore.
I also recommend Battery Snap. It keeps data and displays a graph of all battery usage, so you can easily see what, where and when your battery was draining.
One thing that does seem really good about the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the battery life. I don't know how much continuous use it can handle, because I've never run it out. I've left it sitting around, unused, for a week or so and there's still some life left in the battery the next time I pick it up.
Why do ppl always claim IPad has more apps for it ? Knowing the filtering with respect to installing software on the ipad as well as the almost mandatory use of objective C and the limitations in the available API sets to access hardware... why whould it carry or have the capability to carry more software than an andoid device ?
Because more people write iOS apps than Android apps? Because the iTunes App Store has more apps in it than the Android Market? This is a strange question. Sure, people could theoretically write more apps for Android than iOS... but they don't.
I have a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and I've also used a Xoom. Both are pretty comparable in terms of performance, which means not flawless (video occasionally appears to stutter a little bit) but acceptable. I like the thinness and light weight of the Galaxy Tab. My main beefs with it are:
The onscreen keyboard kind of sucks, like most Android keyboards I've seen. It's slow, and I shouldn't have to toggle in and out of punctuation mode just to type an apostrophe.
The touchscreen resolution doesn't seem very good. In Facebook, for example, next to the logo, there are three icons: A person, a cartoon speech bubble, and a globe. Mostly you'll want to click the globe to see your friends' latest updates. Clicking the globe on the Galaxy Tab is a chore and a half. It wants to select the speech bubble, every time.
The built-in browser still renders pages strangely. It seems to want to reformat Web pages to fit the screen even when that option is not selected. And there are various other rendering quirks -- Slashboxes don't show up at all, for example, and the options in the top tab of Slashdot are scattered all over the place.
The screen aspect ration is widescreen. That's great if you plan to use it to watch Shrek 2 from bed, but for everything else it sort of sucks. In landscape mode, the onscreen keyboard takes up half the screen real estate, making it hard to see what you're doing. In portrait mode, the screen is excessively long and narrow. The iPad uses a more traditional screen ratio that makes it more versatile.
I'm just not so sure what's so great about this kind of device. A netbook is much easier to operate, is more versatile, and is almost as light. I can't see myself sitting on the bus with my Galaxy Tab like an asshole, so it's mostly going to stay at my apartment, where it just feels like a slower, harder to navigate version of the devices I already have.
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When we get to that point, then sound the alarm. As it is, we're not there yet.
Sure we are. OS upgrades occasionally break compatibility with apps. If no further updates are going to be made available for the app because it's been blocked from the Market, and an OS upgrade makes the app start crashing, then that's that.
If you ever have to do a factory reset of your phone, you'll also lose the app, because if it's removed from the Android Market then it's removed from your app account. Normally you could even buy a new phone or tablet and the Android apps you've bought would be automatically pushed to the new device when you register with your Google account. That won't happen now.
Day after the Wal-Mart decision at SCOTUS -- think it got through to the Winkies that SCOTUS is a deep friend of wealthy established multi-billion $ corporate entities? Young Winki, you chose wisely.
Why wisely? Sure, they might spend another half-mil trying to push the case up to SCOTUS, and then they might lose. And what then? They'd basically be right where they are now, minus the half-mil. If you've already won the lottery to the tune of $65 million, why wouldn't you buy one more ticket, just to see?
Perhaps they can get one for being Most Onionesque
i'd vote for that
The scary thing is, they'd face a lot of competition from the mainstream press.
Yes, but the new Galaxy Tab definitely has a bigger screen than the old Galaxy Tab.
Of course, TFA is about the new Galaxy Tab, which has a bigger screen.
My problem even with the bigger screen, though, is that it has the widescreen form factor, unlike the iPad. It's probably great for watching widescreen movies, but I never do that on a tablet. So as it stands, the onscreen keyboard takes up too much space in landscape (sideways) mode, and the screen feels too long and skinny when in portrait mode. The iPad's screen is more balanced.
abstraction layers on top? JQuery type implementations.
Those already exist for mobile devices, jQuery Mobile included.
They're taking another crack at it with JavaFX, but the problem now is that it's pretty late to the party.
And yet, Objective-C keeps climbing on the list of most popular programming languages/platforms. I highly doubt all those Objective-C developers are building Mac OS X applications.
Just to be clear, are you trying to say Google isn't offering an expensive Arduino-based kit? Because they are. I never said you had to buy it from them.
Point me a link to it. The one they handed out for free at Google I/O was manufactured by a third party, a Japanese robotics and automation specialist that has since sold out of its first run.
Lots of nerds will have fun with this, and there will be some commercial products, but it's not going to really be an important feature for consumers.
That's the nature of a development kit that includes prototyping hardware. It's for prototyping, for developers. Not only is it not going to be "an important feature" for consumers, the ADK is not aimed at consumers at all. It is the eventual Android Accessory-compatible devices that are developed using the ADK that will be marketed to consumers.
The only story here (which is by no means new) is that Google has an expensive Arduino kit available as an official add-on to Android.
No. What they have is a completely open reference prototyping platform for building Android accessories, which is based on Arduino. The Arduino platform is itself open, and Google has made every part of the ADK available free of charge under permissive open source licenses, right down to the schematics for the prototyping platform. A number of vendors manufacture the prototyping units, but you don't have to buy them. If you have the know-how, you could build the kit yourself from components. Also, any accessory you invent does not necessarily have to include all of the components found on the prototyping board. The kit includes things like temperature and light sensors, buttons, LEDs, and servo motors. It's easy to imagine devices that won't need all of these things at once, so potential Android accessories could end up costing much less than the prototyping kit, especially when produced on a mass scale.
On whether Chrome will replace Firefox in Ubuntu: Not in the next year, at least.
On companies wanting to own your personal data: It is a little scary.
On Unity vs. Gnome 3: Clearly, some people like Unity and some really don't.
On whether Canonical doesn't contribute enough to the kernel: That's not true.
On why he doesn't own a smartphone: Because he hasn't bought one. Yet.
On why there's no Ubuntu tablet: Unity doesn't really work as a tablet interface.
On getting everyone to use free software: It will be difficult and will take a long time.
Well, I certainly feel better informed!
To be fair, though, too: Nobody at NASA actually predicted an accident, and the specific accident was not the result of some miscalculation (contrary to the wording of TFA). If management steamrolled over the engineers' objections, the result was that the Shuttle was less safe than it could have been. In fact, the vehicle should have been considered unsafe. What constitutes unsafe in this case? According to Richard Feynman, it was "a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate)." So even ignoring engineers' objections, the chance that the mission would go off without a hitch was still considered to be around 99 percent. By NASA's professed standards, that's not safe enough -- but to say that the accident was the result of bad management, I think, goes a little too far. Could the accident have been avoided? Certainly -- there were 99 out of 100 things that could have happened that would have prevented the accident, instead of what actually did happen. And if they reduced the chance of failure to one-half of one percent, there would have been slightly more than 99 out of 100 outcomes where nothing would have failed, and so on. Could "standing up for what you believe in" have prevented the accident with 100 percent certainty? Only with the crystal clarity of hindsight.
B&N has made a big noise about the new Nook Simple Touch Reader flashing "80% less than the original Nook." Apparently it now only flashes about once every five pages instead of every page, according to reviews. Personally, I don't find the flashes all that annoying at all in practice. They might seem annoying when you're just fooling around with the device in the store, pressing buttons and trying to see what it can do, but when you're actually reading a book you stop noticing it pretty quickly.
It amazes me how the whole computing community, including computer scientists and programmers, are being kept hostage by a small group of people who enforce their rules upon them (not only the Microsofts, Apples and Adobes of this world, but also standardization committees such as W3C).
So you don't want a single company in control, but you don't want open standards either. You must really be a masochist if you think everybody should constantly re-invent everything themselves.
So, unless she was very clumsy, or unless the theater was layed out in a very strange way, or unless one of the patrons was looking backwards (rather than at the movie), there's no way she should have shone her flashlight directly into the eyes of other patrons.
Doesn't change the fact that this is an extremely annoying thing to do. You don't have to shine a flashlight "directly into my eyes" for me to see you using a flashlight in a darkened movie theater. I carry an actual flashlight in my pocket, and I'm not dumb enough to use it while a movie is running. I doubt most phone-addicted people would, either. So why is it they think using their phone screen as a flashlight -- when the screen is much bigger than the lens of most flashlights -- is any better?
Your ideas intrigue me (and I was considering subscribing to your newsletter), so I just tried it on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, running Android 3.1 with the stock browser and Adobe Flash Player 10.3.
Predictably, the Flash page-turner doesn't show up (even with plugins set to "Always On"). I get a white screen with a list of links to pages. When I click a link, it sends me a 21.25MB PDF of the report.
But I've said before that I think Flash on Android is useless, and people got all mad and said I was in Apple's pocket. I still challenge anyone to show me something useful they can do with the Flash Player installed on an Android device that they couldn't have done already.
I think that iPad does better at guessing where you actually wanted to click by looking at the "shape" of the fingerprint.
I think that's also why I like the iPhone keyboard much better than any keyboard on any Android phone I've tried. Whatever it is, Apple is doing something right.
Maybe Google doesn't have a license to the patent in question ?
It does, as does Microsoft.
My favourite one is how journalists, particularly TV reporters, love to talk about people being evacuated. I know it can be hard to control one's bowels when faced with extreme danger but I'm pretty sure that's not what they meant.
I like The Wire, too, but this little joke was just something they trumped up for TV. Merriam-Webster gives one definition of evacuate as: "to withdraw from a place in an organized way especially for protection." David Simon says he put it into the show as an homage to one of his copy editors who used to give him a hard time about it; nonetheless, the usage is perfectly fine.
Before the trailers there are multiple announcements (some quite amusing) that spell out very clearly that texting, talking, or using your bright-as-twenty-suns cellphone in any capacity are NOT tolerated.
In her message she says she was using her phone as a flashlight to find her seat (one of the most annoying things you can do in a theater), so chances are she came in mid-movie and didn't see the trailers or the warnings.
Perhaps his point is you don't have to use special software like Handbrake or buy special cables to use HDMI. All this stuff works out of the box on any Android tablet, including playing any format under the sun.
Since TFA is about the Galaxy Tab 10.1, I have to disabuse you of this notion. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 does not have an HDMI port. According to Samsung, "You can even share Tab content on your HDTV through the Tablet Extender feature—or stream it wirelessly with Allshare" ... but I have no idea what the Tablet Extender feature is, or what Allshare is. Neither is mentioned in the product manual.
Considering it just came out on Wednesday, how have you had enough time to leave it around unused for a week?
I got mine at Google I/O in early May. The only thing I can't really speak to yet is Android 3.1 "Honeycomb." Mine came with 3.0 and only got the upgrade to 3.1 on Thursday, so it's possible things like battery life may have changed, but overall for day-to-day use the 3.1 changes seem minimal.
Keyboard: Get SwiftKey. It's much better, and you can long press for most punctuation and numbers.
To clarify, I was using the stock Samsung Keyboard that's the default when you start the machine. You can revert to the Android keyboard, which at least solves the apostrophe problem, but isn't a whole lot better. I'll look at SwiftKey. On my Android phone I use Swype.
Touchscreen: I found this for almost all touchscreen devices. Luckily, now you can just pinch-zoom in, click, pinch unzoom.
If only it was that easy. Seriously, trying to click that control is hell. Enough to frustrate a sensible person to the point that they wouldn't use that device anymore.
I also recommend Battery Snap. It keeps data and displays a graph of all battery usage, so you can easily see what, where and when your battery was draining.
One thing that does seem really good about the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the battery life. I don't know how much continuous use it can handle, because I've never run it out. I've left it sitting around, unused, for a week or so and there's still some life left in the battery the next time I pick it up.
Why do ppl always claim IPad has more apps for it ? Knowing the filtering with respect to installing software on the ipad as well as the almost mandatory use of objective C and the limitations in the available API sets to access hardware ... why whould it carry or have the capability to carry more software than an andoid device ?
Because more people write iOS apps than Android apps? Because the iTunes App Store has more apps in it than the Android Market? This is a strange question. Sure, people could theoretically write more apps for Android than iOS... but they don't.
I have a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and I've also used a Xoom. Both are pretty comparable in terms of performance, which means not flawless (video occasionally appears to stutter a little bit) but acceptable. I like the thinness and light weight of the Galaxy Tab. My main beefs with it are: