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User: MemoryDragon

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  1. Re:Code cleanup on HTC Finally Releases Hero Source Code · · Score: 1

    I dont know must be probably a US mentality, I have yet to see some european sourcecode which had a swear word in it, probably the main difference here is that programmers here simply cry them out into the air (we dont have the cubicle system but small offices mostly) so they do not have to type it in.

  2. Re:As far as I see, it's only kernel source ... on HTC Finally Releases Hero Source Code · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah why should they release the other part, touchflo is their bread and butter, without that they simply would be just another phone vendor and even one with mediocre low end specced hardware. Touchflo is the part which stands out compared to the rest of the phones.
    I would only release the source either if I was in their position.

  3. Re:HTC on HTC Finally Releases Hero Source Code · · Score: 1

    Well before rushing out buying the Samsung wait for the first user reports, the first android Samsung got raving reviews by websites but was flamed to death after a few weeks in the android forums and many reverted back to HTC selling the Samsung phone, the reasons simply were bugs in the drivers (Samsung uses slightly different hardware than htc) and hardware glitches which manifested itself over a few weeks of usage (Stuck buttons, no multitouch, lost calls etc...).
    Also if you already have an Android phone, I would not buy any phone yet, in a few months the first NVidia tegra based phones will hit the market, then things will become really interesting especially with OpenGL SE which will be part of android then (if it not already is), I assume mid next year or so and then it will definitely a good time to upgrade. For now it is neither fish nor flesh. The first generation of android phones is out, most vendors still are on their first iteration hardware (htc is on the bugfixed third iteration of their first gen which is just an indication that the OS has gotten serious optimizations over the last year) and there are still quirks to debugged out by every vendor.

    The main problem is that most phone manufacturers simply relied on the promises of Microsoft to deliver something which can match the iPhone with winmo 6.5 and basically got a rude awakening several months ago, when Microsoft (again) just made empty promises so they are all jumped onto Android relatively late. Anyway better late than never. But all of this is reason enough to wait a few weeks to see which bugs still are there and which are fixed, especially with the Samsung phones. (Samsung already made a new firmware which fixed several bugs in their first gen phone, but others still persist)
    Anyway, I still would recommend, before rushing out and buying a Samsung or Motorola, wait another few weeks until the serious user reports hit the forums then you can start (usually 2 weeks after the phone has been released the user reports become serious and show all flaws and weaknesses)

  4. Re:Anything Motorola has built has been... on Verizon's Challenge To the iPhone Confirmed · · Score: 1

    One of the reasons why I am getting a HTC hero now, I am still in a wait and see loop, the Hero will tie me over the next year and after that better hardware comes along. I neither trust Motorola nor Acer to build solid phones.

  5. Re:What I find most telling about these stories on Verizon's Challenge To the iPhone Confirmed · · Score: 1

    Steve jobs own words: "They (Microsoft) have absolutely no taste"

  6. Re:Why? on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    Actually there are not too many big phone manufacturers left worldwide.
    From what I can think of, there are mainly, Sony Ericson, Samsung, HTC, Apple and Nokia left.
    All of them except Apple and Nokia have Android phones in the pipeline.
    I am not sure if Acer is going to do its own phone, it just could be an oemed HTC.
    Dell definitely wont do its own phone it will be oemed.

  7. Re:Is this necessarily a good thing? on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    Currently the only thing Android is dethroning is WinCE, Microsoft has really screwed up, they are losing all their vendors.

  8. Re:Battery Life is the problem on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    Try to load appkiller the issue is mostly lingering background tasks, android behaves unfortunatly like winmo it does not close applications.
    From what I can gather you should get 1-3 days, more likely 3 if you turn most stuff off.

  9. Re:I wonder if this will help the app ecosystem on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    Actually the reason there are so many apps for the iphone has the tremendous gold rush hype apple was able to start. Android already has a load of applications around 9000 many of them free, I dont think the problem is a s big as windows. The main issue in Windows and J2ME is the API diversity there have been so many vendor extensions that it became really hard to provide a load of applications. J2ME was more prone to this than Windows, in windows the issue was the lack of a central marketplace. WinCE also has a load of applications (probably 20.000-30.000) but there is no central place to download them.
    Google has the huge advantage of having good control over the APIs unlike Sun with J2ME hence they can keep the API stable, the also dont have to deal with backward compatibility so they can tackle things like 3d resolution indepdendend widgets etc.. from the beginning, and so far they have done a good job!

  10. Re:Features I want First. on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    ?
    The os runs in a java-like virtual machine. If it has any relation to Java does this mean it will exhibit memory consumption similar to Java

    The memory consumption you describe is mostly related to the desktop server jvm, it behaves following:
    You have a memory window which is fixed and cannot be overruled by the program, the memory is consumed and no empty memory left alone, the garbage collector is triggered once the memory is filled up.
    Even the mobile editions of java did not have the behavior they were optimized for saving ram.
    Android goes even further, the VM is ram optimized but also has an altered package and class file format and does some prelinking and internal compile time optimization, to save more ram and to avoid the classloader speed bottleneck java generally has. So I assume the entire java thing is a non issue on android, entirely different beast, and so far it looks like the usage of java is a non issue.

  11. Re:After BlackBerry Storm I am ready on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    Actually the speed of android becomes better with every release, and I think one of the big issues in the default installs is the default install itself, the what you describe is a problem of no proper swap space. There are several hacks regarding adding a swap space on the SD, that + a fast SD should to the trick to speed up the messages.

  12. Re:More choice means more flexibility on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    I rather doubt it the android api is really extensive and becomes better every release.
    The biggest problem J2ME made was to limit itself too much and to rely on third party extensions which added incompatible apis, so far android has avoided that mistake.

  13. Re:Any have a decent Camera? on 50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future · · Score: 1

    Actually the Hero has a lousy objective so the pictures even with 5mpix could be better.

  14. Re:Barking up the wronf tree. on Student Loan Interest Rankles College Grads · · Score: 1

    Sheesh this is so unamerican, dont follow such an advice and you are branded as commie :-)
    dreaded western european communist countries.

  15. Re:Waiting for the Acer A1 phone on HTC Dragging Feet On GPL Source Release For "Hero" Phone · · Score: 1

    Besides that Android has a load of optimization possibilities left, the latest hero rom update showed it that most android phone still running on subpar speed of what is possible.
    Android 1.6 probably helps a lot as well as having a decent swap capability etc... there is a load of optimization room. Someone posted a video of a manually optimized hero in here, and that thing was running faster than the iphone which has a stronger processor and a dedicated 3d prozessor. This is amazing given the fact that most android software is writtin in java and huge parts of the API layer as well.

  16. Re:Missing essential sensors, usable screen on HTC Dragging Feet On GPL Source Release For "Hero" Phone · · Score: 1

    According to the reports there are two causes of lag,
    a) The old firmware, HTC has released one a month ago which improves things a lot
    b) Too many apps open you have to download the free App killer tool to compensate this.

  17. Re:The stats say it all on Game Development On Android · · Score: 1

    Actually Android is not as bad as J2ME the main problem with J2ME was simply you had a very small API and almost no support for extended feates, heck even only a handful of UI input fields.
    Android is way more extensive and a full os instead of a vm with a dozend or so apis (the important ones always came from the vendors)
    So far the Android mobiles perform quite nicely regarding compatibility, all programs so far run on all android mobiles unmodified.
    Just because the underlying language in both systems is java does not mean that both systems are comparable, Java is after all just a language nothing more.

  18. Re:Zelda! on Next Nintendo Handheld To Be Powered By NVIDIA's Tegra Chipset · · Score: 1

    Please forgive me of having played Occarina of time in 1200p with an emulator ;-)

  19. Re:Please Google... on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 1

    Yes please google simply stop indexing murdoch media entirely....

  20. Re:Read between the lines ... on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 1

    You brought the issue to the point. Murdoch is pretty aware of the robots.txt but his empire is slowly crumbling (last year he had a big red on the financial results) and he is getting nervous so he tries to find new ways of milking the cow.
    I for one would be happy if the murdoch media would use robots.txt to avoid being indexed, the sooner murdochs papers have removed from this planet the happier I am.

  21. Re:Well, on Dragon Age: Origins To Get Paid DLC Expansion — On Launch Day · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This indeed feels like draining additional money out of the people buying the game. If they brought it out 3 months later no one would complain but this looks more like ripping off customers than anything else.
    What next, basic game for full price which unlocks you the first levels and for finishing the game you have to buy at least 200 dollars of special items?
    EA at its best, I am pretty sure this was not Biowares intent, but they were forced to do this by EA. This is not the Bioware I know of where the two bosses posted on Usenet (Baldurs Gate time) and talked directly to the fans.

  22. EA rears its ugly head on Dragon Age: Origins To Get Paid DLC Expansion — On Launch Day · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Seems like EA already is taking over Biowares customer friendlyness (usually it is 2 games until the EA shit starts to boil in the companies they bought)
    RIP bioware, not that I wont buy Dragon Age, but I am not very eager to buy any expansion, I probably will wait until a collectors edition with all extensions comes out in a year or so.

  23. Re:Sony could've gone the other way on Why the Sony PSP Had To "Go" · · Score: 1

    Well there is a saying, Sony Media kills Sony electronics.
    In the long run I can only see that Sony either splits apart and leaves the electronics division alone, or the electronics division will die a death. It already is on life support thanks to the fact that no one outside of Japan really buys sony electronics anymore how they used to do, the Playstation kept it alive mostly.

    The biggest downfall for the electronics division came with DVD, no one bought expensive Sony DVDs which had almost unbreakable region locks and could only play dvds, when the cheap chinese no name player did not really enforce region locks and also could play mp3 and divx and cost only a fraction of the expensive Sony one. That was the end for Sony in the Home cinema sectory where people did not check for the price but wanted to get the best. It was unjustifyable to get a 3000 dollar player which locked you in if the 50 dollar chinese player from the food discounter next door was better and could do more.

    The second downfall was their stubbornness regarding DRM in their portable players, Apple took over that segment with the ipod (Sony had offerings before the ipod but they all insisted of converting everything mp3 into internal drmed atrac and the software doing that was nothing to give the user a decent experience)
    They have learned, but it was two years to late.

    Third it is the Vayos, I can remember some people having bought from Sony basically everything, those people were people who did not look at the price but they simply relied on the Sony brand, until they got their first Vayo.
    Well after having been out of warranty for two days and having to deal with the european Vayo Sony support, and the estimated repair costs, the Vayo was their last machine.

    The situation has not changed too much I assume ,given their stance regarding graphics cards drivers. Sony sells espensive Vayos with ATI graphics cards drivers but you have to obtain them from them. You cannot use the generic drivers ATI provides. Now if there is a driver which is faulty and Sony has not offered a fixup (although ATI has a fixed driver) you are out of luck. I know at least one model which has exactly this problem, a hacked generic ATI driver helped to finally make the machine stable instead of leaving it in a semi useless state!

    Sony pretty much lost the high end market in endless stupidity and media lockin, all they have left on the electronics side is the Playstation and their the applied stupidity killed it almost as well (PS2 backward compatibility and 100 mio potential customers being left standing cold in the rain)

    I constantly get the feeling that Sony has lost entirely the touch of reality, they live in the Sony world and still think they are the top rulers of the electronics sector, while everyone has been showing them how to do things for almost a decade now.
    Without the Playstation Sony probably would have been reduced to a media only company by now.

  24. Re:MS Just Doesn't Get It... on Windows Mobile 6.5 Launched, Panned · · Score: 1

    Actually in the OS segment Microsoft has always copied apple, so big news there.
    The main issue was that they could get away with it in the 90s an 80s but now apple has a big market
    penetration on mobile devices the average people see it now and this is getting hilarious on microsofts side.

  25. Re:WinMo vs the rest on Windows Mobile 6.5 Launched, Panned · · Score: 1

    Except several things:
    Android development environment does not cost you a dime, neither does eclipse which it is based upon.
    While VStudio.Net costs you a lot unless you use the heavily crippled express version.
    In the end even the iphone development probably is cheaper since the entry cost there is mostly a mac mini.