Task killer is a no go, actually Task Killer is the biggest battery drain, do not use it, it constantly polls your process list. Android does fine is its own internal garbage collector and it works fine for Android 2.x. The biggest bad habit people carry over from WinMobile is installing task killers, they do more harm than good. I have been running Android for months now without them, never missed them and the battery consumption actually was significantly reduced by not using them. Neither was performance, actually once the task killer was removed the overall performance got better.
Well I was stricktly speaking about Android phones, which is an area where mostly ex WinMobile companies are around and they took their old habits with them.
Other companies have a better track record, RIM for instance, or Apple, which you now can rely on having a 2 years of support (which should be standard, given the contractual times most carriers enforce), also Nokia on some models (Nokia is a hit and miss in this regard, but some of their models are really well supported, while others are cash in and run, like the rest of the industry) But given that there still is Google and I love Android I wont be switching over to apple and their draconian lockin (which is the reason why I went with Android in the first place, Apple computers yes, apple end user gadgets, no)
Yes, I have been running Android 2.1 from those guys and the ones from htcpedia.com, however, all those roms have their weaknesses, for instance, while it runs perfectly (the one I am running now) I found out yesterday that MMS was not working. So hacked roms, while being nice often, almost ever are buggy. The only ones running fine are the 1.5 ones because the community has kernel access to them. Until HTC releases the official 2.1 rom for the Hero (and the sources a few weeks after that for the kernel) the situation wont change. Add to that that HTC has more and more barriers added for rooting their phones with every newer model. The Legend still is unrooted, and you can see where things are heading.
Now compared that to the N1, Google allows to root the phone officially, you get Android the day google releases it, until the rather powerful hardware is not able anymore to cope with it. Same prices a little bit of less functionality, but top notch software support and open for the community to take over. Sorry but Google has won me over, for the next phone.
Problem is the rest of the industry is as miserable as HTC in this regard, Samsung, good luck to get any update after a few months, but they also have shoddy hardware usually, while HTCs is rock solid.
Motorola, they have good hardware, and so far the track record of software support is there, but outside of the USA they pulled the DRM stunt, by encrypting the bootloader, so that the phone is basically locked down and the community is prevented to open it to flash it on their own (Note this is basically just for the Milestone, the Droid is relatively open). So what if Motorola decides not to support the phone anymore.
Sony/Ericsson, they are still to new in the Android area, but given their track record, I do not have high hopes.
LG... shoddy hardware, and given LGs track record I would not have high hopes either to get a good customer support out of them
Acer... they just pulled the screw your existing customers by not supporting them stunt on the Liquid One. While having good hardware, the phone is a no buy.
So all I can say is, if you want Android, opt directly for Google, that is the only chance of being not entirely screwed by the manufacturer. Android itself is excellent, but the phone makers try hard to carry over their advertise sell and run businessmodell from WinMobile days.
That they have excellent hardware but their long term software support is as miserable as the rest of the industry. Usually you get the phone, and as soon as you are out of the store, they dont see you as a customer anymore. If you are lucky you get one quick bugfix update, and then you wait for ages and if you are lucky you get another software update. The classical example this time is the HTC Hero, the top phone from them until January. The Android 1.6 update was promised, than they said, they were going for straight 2.0 in january, then february March etc... Now they have released the HTC Legend which is almost the same as the Hero except for the sensor instead of the trackball and the aluminium casing, it has Android 2.1, well the result was to protect their Legend sales the Hero update again was postponed to June. However in May Android 2.2 will be released.
All I can say is avoid this phone like the plaque go for the Nexus 1 which will get the software updates in time for the forseeable future unless you are willing to hack your phone open and use the community as software update center. Actually the Hero will be my last non google branded phone. HTC has pulled the same stunt back then on the touch, and I should have been warned, now they are pulling the same stunt again with the Hero.
As for me I will run the Hero until the end of the year and then will go straight for what Google has to offer (hopefully a non HTC Nexus2)
Actually I personally think that in the long run this will be outsourced to companies like Google or Akmai who have the knowledge to run such infrastructure. Just look at what google provides with their app engine, and you can see that they are preparing their infrastructure for cloud outsourcing customers. Problem is, that companies like Ubisoft probably do not want to give their servers away but neither have the infrastructure nor the knowledge to keep up such services reliably. Add to that that after 2-3 years running the services will become a money drain and they have to pull it. Given ubisofts history they will not provide a patch, but since one of the Ubisoft management guys openly stated they will... Well all I can say is once they pull this stunt, drag them to court over their own words!
Problem is you you move parts of the code to the server you run into bigger load problems than Ubisoft currently has, they obviously do not have the infrastructure to keep that alive without outages, then you have the lag. Etc... it will become harder to crack, but they will alienate even more customers that way, and in the end no one will buy their games anymore. Sersiously, if the industry is going to move to DRM like that I will give up gaming, or just buy independend anymore. It is not like it hurts if you stop gaming, or play your unplayed back catalog. It is just like giving up an old habit.
Actually I see it more as a testing ground on how far they can go, Capcom currently tries to pull the same stunt on the PS3. The PC market while not as big as it used to be still is very big, you just do not see it officially because the charts are usually done by the retail sales, but the market has moved over to online sales to a very big degree. Add to that that the console market is also fragmented over platforms and you have a general pc market which is about as big as a single console platform. Hardly a platform worth leaving. But you have more freedom on the PC and you can pull stunts like that as testing ground.
I had the exact feeling about their games when I bought the last Prince of Persia (I bought it because it was DRM free) the game was all about looks but not about fun, I am not sure when Ubisoft changed their attitude, but the game was clearly not good although it looked spectacular. Seems like the last PoP will be the last game from them I have bought in a long time, since they are hell bent to keep up their DRM.
The funny thing is, that they will alienate even more customers by this... interesting to see how a company runs itself into the ground by sheer stupidity and greed.
My personal guess is they lost a load more legit customers over this especially once who bought the game and were pissed afterwards by the entire protection, than what they could gain by this DRM on new sales by not being copyable. Given their charts numbers my personal guess is the sales were mediocre at best and I would not be surprised if they keep the DRM up that the next load of games will become a sales fiasco. The now once burned customers (Who initially did not have a clue) will not return, but will simply stay away.
Upps sorry, sometimes I should read the entire posting, thanks for positing your honest opinion, all I can say, is leave this shithouse they are hell bent on destroying themselves for the sake of greed. I personally still think the entire thing will end up in a sales and reputation fiasco which will be hard to fix.
I stopped buying their games no matter what platform either, so far three lost sales, the number going up, the next PoP would have been one additional sale for them. Actually now I would have wished I would have pirated at least one game from them, but the matter of fact is I have not.
Hi I am your ex customer, tell your greedy stupid ass**** in the management, that your DRM alone on my person has lost you about three sure sales, and I will boykott your games as long as your DRM is unpatched by you. (And I am probably not alone, just look at amazon, your reputation currently is flushed down the toilet, and I do not care if the crackers have done a service you guys should have done, I still will not buy AC2 which I originally wanted to buy)
F*** Ubisoft, you do not deserve any better than going bankrupt! You crossed a line you never should have, I was a loyal customer, but not anymore. I am really pissed, and no I have not pirated even one single game by your company, I wish I had... (Btw. my first Ubisoft game was stupid invaders, so go figure how many games I have bought from you guys)
Go along the route and watch your sales going down, given the sales stats of the PC versions and their relatively swiftly dissapearance from the charts, the DRM already has backfired to some degree, wait for the next games to be released which probably wont even hit the charts anymore. Go that route Ubisoft, you obviously have deserved to go down the toilet, where you obviously belong to.
With ajax it depends heavily on the browser, on modern browsers good ajax usage is way faster than plain html, on older browsers it can become a problem, but it all depends on the usage and on how much of the dom is updated client side.
This guy is promiting iFrames as Ajax alternative, this technique has been used before Ajax was there and there was/is a reason why Ajax is used for ppr, and that is flexibitlity, and iframes can cause hanging endless connections.
Heck iFrames even still are used with Ajax as transport layer (in combination with javascript) because the ajax is broken due to the fact that it does not allow multipart form requests.
I still do not know why this article made it on slashdot, it would be more interesting if it was talking about the html5 websockets, which finally will get us rid of that pesky ajax.
I am not quite sure if the EU and the US would allow such a deal after all it basically would be problematic for an entire industry with billions of dollars in revenue. ARM has pretty much a monopoly on handheld processors.
Actually you can use any jvm based language with applets, applets are just an API sitting within the JVM and all the JVM wants is compiled class files.
The advantage probably was on slashdots side, since using ajax saves a load of traffic because only partial document contents are updated. But using Ajax not necessarily means you have to avoid the back button, you can program it to behave correctly, at least for most modern browsers. Although the approaches are somewhat hackish they normally work well enough.
Not really, many dicussion groups are on usenet, but most of them never came out of the mailing list age (which is a pity, since mailinglists are a major pain), but fortunately there are services like gmane which provide a usenet frontend in front of most major oss mailinglists.
You only can make rails scalable by going into the java domain even by just moving over to jruby to get threading... but even then rails follows patterns which have their limits the more you need scalability the more you have to move away from what rails provides ootb and the less you save time. But in the end, scaffolding is the only real timesaver there, and rails has no monopoly in this area, and I would not even call a scallfolder too much of a timesaver it saves some time for the standard coding frontiers, but in the end, you still need to layout every page there is (although you can cover a lot of common ground with CSS) and the special cases have to be hardcoded and there you are locked into the boundaries of rails.
Btw. interfaces do not prevent not to have real properties, you could use a special property keyword to push them into interfaces without having to revert to endless setters and getters.
I would not scale annoying it is a nice language, but I am not sure about its approach of pressing domain specific language mechanisms into the core. Outside of that it is nice, although I settled for groovy for my scripting language needs, in this area. Scala does not bring too much to the table for me to switch over for the occasional usage I have for this language domain (which is mostly, prototyping, switching over whenever closures make sense etc...) The biggest problem is that many companies have a no scripting language policy which often stupiditly ties into the compiled domain, so even if the language is compiled you still cannot use it.
I think so too, Wicket is a really nice webapp framework, probably one of the best there is, and since it limits itself only to the ui aspects you can use whatever the entire java ecosystem provides in the backend area, which is a lot. I am not sure if moving to an abstraction like grails provides really will make him happy, but I have yet to use grails (although I work with lot of groovy) I only can see the auto scaffolding being a timesaver for him, outside of that he just replaces one language with the other (you also can do wicket in groovy) and maybe a proven work environment with another one.
And seriously auto scaffolding can be done with a handful of templates and a few hours of code yourself. I did that years before Rails hyped it into oblivion for an application where I generated about 60% of it with the scaffolder. But that does not releave you of the rest of the gruntwork and that you have to deal with the nasty web layouting.
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Task killer is a no go, actually Task Killer is the biggest battery drain, do not use it, it constantly polls your process list. Android does fine is its own internal garbage collector and it works fine for Android 2.x. The biggest bad habit people carry over from WinMobile is installing task killers, they do more harm than good. I have been running Android for months now without them, never missed them and the battery consumption actually was significantly reduced by not using them.
Neither was performance, actually once the task killer was removed the overall performance got better.
Well I was stricktly speaking about Android phones, which is an area where mostly ex WinMobile companies are around and they took their old habits with them.
Other companies have a better track record, RIM for instance, or Apple, which you now can rely on having a 2 years of support (which should be standard, given the contractual times most carriers enforce), also Nokia on some models (Nokia is a hit and miss in this regard, but some of their models are really well supported, while others are cash in and run, like the rest of the industry)
But given that there still is Google and I love Android I wont be switching over to apple and their draconian lockin (which is the reason why I went with Android in the first place, Apple computers yes, apple end user gadgets, no)
Yes, I have been running Android 2.1 from those guys and the ones from htcpedia.com, however, all those roms have their weaknesses, for instance, while it runs perfectly (the one I am running now) I found out yesterday that MMS was not working.
So hacked roms, while being nice often, almost ever are buggy. The only ones running fine are the 1.5 ones because the community has kernel access to them.
Until HTC releases the official 2.1 rom for the Hero (and the sources a few weeks after that for the kernel) the situation wont change.
Add to that that HTC has more and more barriers added for rooting their phones with every newer model. The Legend still is unrooted, and you can see where things are heading.
Now compared that to the N1, Google allows to root the phone officially, you get Android the day google releases it, until the rather powerful hardware is not able anymore to cope with it.
Same prices a little bit of less functionality, but top notch software support and open for the community to take over.
Sorry but Google has won me over, for the next phone.
Problem is the rest of the industry is as miserable as HTC in this regard, Samsung, good luck to get any update after a few months, but they also have shoddy hardware usually, while HTCs is rock solid.
Motorola, they have good hardware, and so far the track record of software support is there, but outside of the USA they pulled the DRM stunt, by encrypting the bootloader, so that the phone is basically locked down and the community is prevented to open it to flash it on their own (Note this is basically just for the Milestone, the Droid is relatively open). So what if Motorola decides not to support the phone anymore.
Sony/Ericsson, they are still to new in the Android area, but given their track record, I do not have high hopes.
LG... shoddy hardware, and given LGs track record I would not have high hopes either to get a good customer support out of them
Acer... they just pulled the screw your existing customers by not supporting them stunt on the Liquid One. While having good hardware, the phone is a no buy.
So all I can say is, if you want Android, opt directly for Google, that is the only chance of being not entirely screwed by the manufacturer. Android itself is excellent, but the phone makers try hard to carry over their advertise sell and run businessmodell from WinMobile days.
That they have excellent hardware but their long term software support is as miserable as the rest of the industry.
Usually you get the phone, and as soon as you are out of the store, they dont see you as a customer anymore.
If you are lucky you get one quick bugfix update, and then you wait for ages and if you are lucky you get another software update.
The classical example this time is the HTC Hero, the top phone from them until January.
The Android 1.6 update was promised, than they said, they were going for straight 2.0 in january, then february March etc...
Now they have released the HTC Legend which is almost the same as the Hero except for the sensor instead of the trackball
and the aluminium casing, it has Android 2.1, well the result was to protect their Legend sales the Hero update again was postponed
to June. However in May Android 2.2 will be released.
All I can say is avoid this phone like the plaque go for the Nexus 1 which will get the software updates in time for the forseeable future unless you are willing to hack your phone open and use the community as software update center.
Actually the Hero will be my last non google branded phone. HTC has pulled the same stunt back then on the touch, and I should have been warned, now they are pulling the same stunt again with the Hero.
As for me I will run the Hero until the end of the year and then will go straight for what Google has to offer (hopefully a non HTC Nexus2)
Actually I personally think that in the long run this will be outsourced to companies like Google or Akmai who have the knowledge to run such infrastructure. Just look at what google provides with their app engine, and you can see that they are preparing their infrastructure for cloud outsourcing customers.
Problem is, that companies like Ubisoft probably do not want to give their servers away but neither have the infrastructure nor the knowledge to keep up such services reliably. Add to that that after 2-3 years running the services will become a money drain and they have to pull it. Given ubisofts history they will not provide a patch, but since one of the Ubisoft management guys openly stated they will... Well all I can say is once they pull this stunt, drag them to court over their own words!
Problem is you you move parts of the code to the server you run into bigger load problems than Ubisoft currently has, they obviously do not have the infrastructure to keep that alive without outages, then you have the lag.
Etc... it will become harder to crack, but they will alienate even more customers that way, and in the end no one will buy their games anymore.
Sersiously, if the industry is going to move to DRM like that I will give up gaming, or just buy independend anymore. It is not like it hurts if you stop gaming, or play your unplayed back catalog.
It is just like giving up an old habit.
Actually I see it more as a testing ground on how far they can go, Capcom currently tries to pull the same stunt on the PS3.
The PC market while not as big as it used to be still is very big, you just do not see it officially because the charts are usually done by the retail sales, but the market has moved over to online sales to a very big degree.
Add to that that the console market is also fragmented over platforms and you have a general pc market which is about as big as a single console platform. Hardly a platform worth leaving.
But you have more freedom on the PC and you can pull stunts like that as testing ground.
I had the exact feeling about their games when I bought the last Prince of Persia (I bought it because it was DRM free)
the game was all about looks but not about fun, I am not sure when Ubisoft changed their attitude, but the game was clearly not good although it looked spectacular.
Seems like the last PoP will be the last game from them I have bought in a long time, since they are hell bent to keep up their DRM.
The funny thing is, that they will alienate even more customers by this... interesting to see how a company runs itself into the ground by sheer stupidity and greed.
My personal guess is they lost a load more legit customers over this especially once who bought the game and were pissed afterwards by the entire protection, than what they could gain by this DRM on new sales by not being copyable.
Given their charts numbers my personal guess is the sales were mediocre at best and I would not be surprised if they keep the DRM up that the next load of games will become a sales fiasco. The now once burned customers (Who initially did not have a clue) will not return, but will simply stay away.
Upps sorry, sometimes I should read the entire posting, thanks for positing your honest opinion, all I can say, is leave this shithouse they are hell bent on destroying themselves for the sake of greed.
I personally still think the entire thing will end up in a sales and reputation fiasco which will be hard to fix.
I stopped buying their games no matter what platform either, so far three lost sales, the number going up, the next PoP would have been one additional sale for them.
Actually now I would have wished I would have pirated at least one game from them, but the matter of fact is I have not.
Hi I am your ex customer, tell your greedy stupid ass**** in the management, that your DRM alone on my person has lost you about three sure sales, and I will boykott your games as long as your DRM is unpatched by you. (And I am probably not alone, just look at amazon, your reputation
currently is flushed down the toilet, and I do not care if the crackers have done a service you guys should have done, I still will not buy AC2 which I originally wanted to buy)
F*** Ubisoft, you do not deserve any better than going bankrupt!
You crossed a line you never should have, I was a loyal customer, but not anymore. I am really pissed, and no I have not
pirated even one single game by your company, I wish I had...
(Btw. my first Ubisoft game was stupid invaders, so go figure how many games I have bought from you guys)
Go along the route and watch your sales going down, given the sales stats of the PC versions and their relatively swiftly dissapearance
from the charts, the DRM already has backfired to some degree, wait for the next games to be released which probably wont even hit the charts anymore. Go that route Ubisoft, you obviously have deserved to go down the toilet, where you obviously belong to.
With ajax it depends heavily on the browser, on modern browsers good ajax usage is way faster than plain html, on older browsers it can become a problem, but it all depends on the usage and
on how much of the dom is updated client side.
This guy is promiting iFrames as Ajax alternative, this technique has been used before Ajax was there and there was/is a reason why Ajax is used for ppr, and that is flexibitlity, and iframes can cause hanging endless connections.
Heck iFrames even still are used with Ajax as transport layer (in combination with javascript)
because the ajax is broken due to the fact that it does not allow multipart form requests.
I still do not know why this article made it on slashdot, it would be more interesting if it was talking about the html5
websockets, which finally will get us rid of that pesky ajax.
I am not quite sure if the EU and the US would allow such a deal after all it basically would be problematic for an entire industry with billions of dollars in revenue.
ARM has pretty much a monopoly on handheld processors.
Actually you can use any jvm based language with applets, applets are just an API sitting within the JVM and all the JVM wants is compiled class files.
The advantage probably was on slashdots side, since using ajax saves a load of traffic because only partial document contents are updated.
But using Ajax not necessarily means you have to avoid the back button, you can program it to behave correctly, at least for most modern browsers. Although the approaches are somewhat hackish they normally work well enough.
Not really, many dicussion groups are on usenet, but most of them never came out of the mailing list age (which is a pity, since mailinglists are a major pain), but fortunately there are services like gmane which provide a usenet frontend in front of most major oss mailinglists.
The name they were throwing away was iBrator...
You only can make rails scalable by going into the java domain even by just moving over to jruby to get threading ... but even then rails follows patterns which have their limits the more you need scalability the more you have to move away from what rails provides ootb and the less you save time.
But in the end, scaffolding is the only real timesaver there, and rails has no monopoly in this area, and I would not even call a scallfolder too much of a timesaver it saves some time for the standard coding frontiers, but in the end, you still need to layout every page there is (although you can cover a lot of common ground with CSS) and the special cases have to be hardcoded and there you are locked into the boundaries of rails.
Btw. interfaces do not prevent not to have real properties, you could use a special property keyword to push them into interfaces without having to revert to endless setters and getters.
I would not scale annoying it is a nice language, but I am not sure about its approach of pressing domain specific language mechanisms into the core.
Outside of that it is nice, although I settled for groovy for my scripting language needs, in this area. Scala does not bring too much to the table for me to switch over for the occasional usage I have for this language domain (which is mostly, prototyping, switching over whenever closures make sense etc...)
The biggest problem is that many companies have a no scripting language policy which often stupiditly ties into the compiled domain, so even if the language is compiled you still cannot use it.
I think so too, Wicket is a really nice webapp framework, probably one of the best there is, and since it limits itself only to the ui aspects you can use whatever the entire java ecosystem provides in the backend area, which is a lot. I am not sure if moving to an abstraction like grails provides really will make him happy, but I have yet to use grails (although I work with lot of groovy)
I only can see the auto scaffolding being a timesaver for him, outside of that he just replaces one language with the other (you also can do wicket in groovy)
and maybe a proven work environment with another one.
And seriously auto scaffolding can be done with a handful of templates and a few hours of code yourself. I did that years before Rails hyped it into oblivion for an application where I generated about 60% of it with the scaffolder. But that does not releave you of the rest of the gruntwork and that you have to deal with the nasty web layouting.