The parent means a three-finger tap (three fingers at once on a multi-touch compatible trackpad), not three sequential left-button taps! It's a neat feature -- you can also do a three-finger drag to move the window around.
... which are, in fact, the default bindings in Unity.
I'm not sure how that Ars reviewer was picked to write TFA, but he seemed a bit dated in his ideas about Linux compatibility. Granted that I do my research on hardware before buying, but it's been a very long time since I've had any trouble using two-finger scrolling (with inertial scrolling), or getting wifi to work, or getting (for crying out loud!) sound to work. Those are issues from a decade ago; they shouldn't be problems now.
But sooner or later backlit LCD/LED/OLED screens will have some type of control / settings which will approximate an e-ink experience.
I'm not so sure it's that simple -- one of e-Ink's great strengths is the battery life, since the screen requires no power except for page turns. It's a one-trick pony, of course, as you by nature don't want a high-refresh rate and so most other applications except for reading books won't work. But the trick is so damn good, I think it'll stick around for a long time to come (or at least for as long as people still care about reading books). Apart from anything else, it's just so damn nice to have a piece of electronic equipment that goes months without needing a charge, even with heavy usage.
Personally, I carry both a 7" tablet and a kindle with me when I travel: I use the tablet for doing tablety-things and the kindle for doing booky-things. They're both so small and light (especially the kindle) that it's no issue carrying both (and if I had to ditch one, it'd be the tablet). Maybe the biggest problem for the kindle is that it does it's job *too* well -- I still have an old kindle keyboard, and haven't felt the need to upgrade; but assuming Amazon are treating them like cheap razors with the ebooks as the blades, I guess that doesn't matter too much.
I run (unofficial) Cyanogenmod and mostly like it, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Every release has a little something important broken. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to the people doing this stuff for free, but when your battery life suddenly gets cut in half and you have to choose between a working camera in the newest release or short battery life, it gets to be a PITA. Plus, it's a time sink...
Seriously -- you're using an unsupported community build of CM with god-knows-what kernel and you think this is a representative experience??
I'm not sure what to say to FUD like that, except that official CM builds are very carefully vetted (there still isn't an official "stable" build of Android 4.2, for example, even six months after the 4.2 codebase was merged and an enormous number of fixes and changes applied since). But I've never seen any issues like what you're complaining about, even running nightly builds (which I've been doing since 2010).
The other major piece of misinformation in your post is claiming it's a time sink. It's not. For some considerable time now, CM has shipped with a CM-updater utility that will (as an option) check regularly for new builds (you can specify whether or not you want nightlies, experimental releases, stable releases included) and will download any updates. On your acceptance of a prompt, the new build will be installed and the device rebooted without the user having to do or manage anything -- it's that simple. No messing about with recovery, no downloading files from XDA, no mess, no fuss. It's all automagic, and it works perfectly, so much so that current builds actually disable the ability to manually reboot into recovery by default. The whole process is just as easy, in fact, as installing an update from your carrier. (But of course, you wouldn't be aware of any of the above as you're not running an official CM build.)
The great thing about open source software is that anyone can take CM's codebase and build their own ROM for any particular unsupported brand of phone. But please don't judge some half-baked, buggy XDA community build with the quality that's coming out of cyanogenmod right now.
Oh, I'd take a phone with 128Gb storage, but I'm not sure it's going to happen any time soon. At least, not from Google while they're still pushing their stupid cloud storage concept...:(
A few months ago I moved the Dalvik cache onto an Ext3 partition and it helped somewhat. I still have over half of my apps moved to the SD card because everything will not fit.
That's storage space, not RAM. Your Nexus One may suffer from memory constraints as well, but they'll have nothing to do with the number of applications you store on your SD card, or where you put your Dalvik cache...
... would you prefer the full memory allocation of the browser to be swapped out to disk each time?? If you've got the number of tabs open that I normally have, that's a substantial amount of disk space being taken up (and free space on my phone is generally at a premium, it being one of the non-SD-card-compliant nexii...)
I'm sure you could write a browser that would do this, but I doubt many people would want to use it...
I wasn't referring to Keep in particular (which I agree isn't particularly innovative except perhaps in its sheer simplicity, which I do rather appreciate). But the Google cycle of trying lots of new things out and seeing what sticks is something I very much approve of. One thing you have to give Google credit for -- they haven't allowed themselves to stagnate like Apple has in the last few years. And maybe it's all just a ploy to protect their search advertising revenue, but either way the results have been amazing.
Geez, it's called innovation. You try some things out... some take off, some don't; the ones that work you keep, the ones that don't you ditch. But at least Google keeps trying things out. Would you prefer it if they always just pushed out the same-old, same-old?
Personally, I find that I've stopped using Google's failed offerings (Google Notebook, Google Reader) long before they get officially canned, and I presume most other people have too. But the consolation is that they were only developed through a business model that constantly pushes the envelope -- if Google had been sticking to core services, neither Notebook nor Reader would ever have seen the light of day to being with.
I mean, the IBM 8088AT class computers with giant 5.25 floppy drives had the ability to save text documents...
A 5.25" disk wasn't a giant floppy back in the day, they were the small ones. It was the 8" disks that were giant.
If you still want to carry around physical storage media and do the constant save, copy, save shuffle between your home computer, your work computer and your phone, be my guest. But I'll take the cloud every day and twice on Sundays for its ease and convenience.
(I also, incidentally, have some faith that Google won't resell my personal data, as it would be completely contrary to their best interests. Google's business model involves getting every advertiser to use Google's own algorithms and data to achieve the best ad delivery to customers. Why would Google ever want to give out to others the information that makes it unique? Their plan, as far as I can see, is simple -- keep everyone using Google products for everything, and thus keep advertisers coming to Google. And if even that concept upsets you, you might as well pull the network cable from your computer, destroy your credit cards and have done with it. Paypal, Amazon and my credit card companies probably know more about my life than Google does, and they happen to know my address to boot...)
My experience with random Android devices is it's hit or miss on rooting. If you have a good OEM (Asus has been good to me) then it's not a problem. But if you have ones that lock it down it's not any different than having an iPhone.
Actually, it's a lot better than what you think (and much better than it used to be several years ago -- I looked into this the other day). Motorola, HTC, Sony and even some of the smaller providers such as Huawei all provide the means to officially unlock the bootloader on many of their phones. Even Samsung provides "Developer Editions" of their major phones that come with an unlocked bootloader by default; and of course every Nexus device is simply a "fastboot oem unlock" away from complete freedom. Impressive, no? There's now an awful lot of devices that you can officially install a custom recovery on and root out of the box, and it's testimony to the strength of the Android dev community that manufacturers actually want to provide this functionality.
Although I wish someone would port apt-get to Android so we can install apps like you can with Cydia.
Well, you don't really need it, unless you have a particular boner for apt-get. Google's own Play Store hosts many apps that do the same thing as those provided by Cydia; since Google has always promoted rooting rather than been adverse to the practice, there's never been a need to have a separate software repository for rooted devices. There are, of course, several other alternate app stores around should you wish to install software through non-Google means and be notified of updates.
It's not about google now, or app compatibility. It's about having a secure, up-to-date, bug-free OS and the better performance and features that come with new versions of Android. It's probably also worth pointing out that CyanogenMod comes with the ability to update itself -- fully automatically and painlessly -- from within the system settings... so after the initial rooting and the installation of custom recovery you'll never have to worry about "rooting and tooting" again.
You can root and install CyanogenMod on many phones in less time than it probably took you to write all your posts on this/. article. That doesn't seem much of an investment of time and effort to me, considering everything you gain.
An unlocked bootloader definitely makes it easier. Thankfully, there are quite a few phones with bootloaders than can be unlocked now (I notice both HTC and Samsung have released "developer editions" of their phones with unlocked bootloaders, so kudos to them both), and quite a lot more have known exploits that can be used to effect the same.
However, without Android being open source there's no way a community ROM like CyanogenMod could exist and maintain an up-to-date Android distribution. You certainly couldn't do that with either iOS or Windows Phone.
Not just the radio. An older Nokia phone will easily last 2 weeks in standby mode too. It's the large, backlit, colour screen and the CPU / GPU that drain the battery life in a modern phone far faster than pinging a network tower periodically to let it know you're still active.
No Nokia phone that I owned ever did that! I was lucky to get three days of standby, and never bargained for more than two...
Seriously, the radio (inc. wifi if on) is by far the heaviest drain on a smartphone. Try putting yours in airplane mode and just use it as a PDA -- I bet you'll be impressed.
Microsoft were fined for a reason. Who cares that google complained?
I don't think you quite understand how the tech world has changed. With the rise of Android, iOS and OSX, Microsoft has become the new underdog. It's only right and just to give minority OSes your support when big corporate bullies try to take them down.
Remember the love, people. When new items of hardware are released, make sure the question is asked here on/., "Sure, but can it run Windows??"
No, you just explained why they would NOT. As soon as the government is mandating that a journal publish "all research that is even partially funded by the federal government", then you make it a lower class medium.
Well, not really, as you can have multiple open-access journals -- which is the exact situation that we have at the moment. (There are actually a fair number of open-access journals out there, just not all of them have the same reputation as the PLoS stable. Pity the author of the/. article didn't do his/her research before writing a long and mostly uninformed diatribe.) There's even a new open access journal (eLife) which is trying to set itself up as the Nature/Science of open-access, only taking papers of the very highest quality. We'll see whether or not that works out in a few years' time, when the impact factors get calculated.
The bigger problem is that most papers these days are authored by postdocs, who are under constant pressure to publish in as high-impact journals as possible as quickly as possible. I don't know a single postdoc who has a publication record good enough to be able to "sacrifice" a major paper to a new open-access journal in the hope that in a couple of years that journal might have an excellent reputation -- and I work in one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
But in any case, I'm not sure it really matters. Pretty much every university has access to the major non-free journals, and many of these journals are going down an open-access-after-one-year (or similar time frame) route. Pretty much everyone who could use journal articles has access to them as it is. And I should add that the main premise of this entire article (that the costs of an open access journal are minimal) is incorrect -- journals need editors, both academic editors and copy-editors, to output decent content. These individuals are generally not in the employ of universities, and need a funding source. (Which is the major reason why PLoS and other open-access journals put the costs onto the article authors instead of the readership; eLife is trying a slightly different approach, which is to be supported directly by funding agencies, although the net effect is essentially the same). Whether we fund journals via readership costs or grant costs doesn't change the central point, which is that the money has to come from somewhere.
Not to burst your bubble, but one of the big drawbacks of the Nexus line is the consistent the lack of removable storage -- the last three Nexus phones haven't had a micro-SD slot. Other than that, Nexuses (Nexii?) are wonderful things because they're open by design; but if you really like removable storage you're probably not going to be so happy. I completely agree with you about SD cards, incidentally; it's one of the things I miss in my current phone (a Nexus S -- over two years old, but still going strong).
But I suspect micro-SD slots are a thing of the past now. And on the plus side, you do get a little more security for your data should your phone be stolen (not that a sensible OS couldn't in theory encrypt the SD card storage, but I don't think you can do this on Android.)
(btw, the battery thing may also get you down -- the Nexus 4 doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, either. But, hey, at least it's a cheap phone!:)
Ever try to buy a non-Apple equivalent of MacBook Air?
Just did. It's called a Samsung Series 9 (the 13.3" model) and it's thinner and lighter than a MacBook Air, plus it comes with an amazing IPS screen and it runs Ubuntu perfectly. Looks are subjective and meaningless, of course, but I'd personally also take it over the Air for physical beauty.
Samsung are the new Apple. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but it's the way the world is headed.
Apple sells iPhones outside of the US. What is their global marketshare?
This map may be of interest; mouse-over each country to see the breakdown. Of course, it's web usage stats not sales, so you can probably expect android to be a bit higher than reported as its market share has been increasing. But still, the geographical distribution is fascinating.
I wonder, what's to stop iPhone 5 users from plugging in a Lightning cable into one of the powered USB ports on this device? Nothing? So why the need to cancel it?
Well, you clearly didn't RTFA. If you had, you'd have read this:
"This is not necessarily the end of the Edison Junior’s portable power project. Siminoff told me that the team will be re-focusing on a device that supports Android phones, tablets, and Apple products, if backers wish to use a Lightning-to-USB connector, or an older 30-pin connector. They’ll only build that device, however, if the crowdfunding community wants it."
The problem was that they'd promised a specific product to their backers, and they couldn't deliver it because Apple pulled the plug (pardon the pun).
Incidentally, what most people are missing is that Apple didn't prevent licensing of the lightning adapter by itself, but rather of the lightning adaptor in combination with other plug options. How crazy is that??
I find Groklaw to be filled with amateur web sleuths who have nothing better to do with their time than to shake their angry fists at successful corporations.
Ah, yes, like the way Groklaw shook its fists at that successful corporation SCO.
A better source of information on patent law is FOSS Patents.
I don't put anything on Google services that I might want to claim copyright on, for similar reasons. Google's TOS includes an unlimited license for them to publish any material that users put on their services:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
To be fair, if you choose to upload your files to Google, they'd be in a lot of trouble if they didn't have a license to host, store and reproduce them. The rest of their terms could be related to the use they make of things designed to be public, such as user-contributed translations. Google's terms of use were a lot better when there were separate terms for separate products; the enveloping of every single Google product under a single TOS (presumably to save on legal redrafting costs for each TOS) has made things seem a lot dodgier. Or it could be them being deliberately evil... as always, we don't know. It would have been a lot more reassuring if Google had kept individual and separate TOS for all their products.
But I suspect Instagram did genuinely only intend to do what they say in TFA -- to let users willingly promote companies or products that they like. (God knows why people want to do this, but it seems clear from facebook that some people just can't get enough of being unpaid shills for products...) Instagram got lawyers to draft their new terms of service, and those lawyers came up with the simplest terms to give Instagram the freedom to do what they envisioned. Problem is, of course, that those terms also permit an awful lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Series 9. Expensive, but worth every penny if you can afford it. Amazingly good screen, too ...
The parent means a three-finger tap (three fingers at once on a multi-touch compatible trackpad), not three sequential left-button taps! It's a neat feature -- you can also do a three-finger drag to move the window around.
alt-button1: move
alt-button2: resize
... which are, in fact, the default bindings in Unity.
I'm not sure how that Ars reviewer was picked to write TFA, but he seemed a bit dated in his ideas about Linux compatibility. Granted that I do my research on hardware before buying, but it's been a very long time since I've had any trouble using two-finger scrolling (with inertial scrolling), or getting wifi to work, or getting (for crying out loud!) sound to work. Those are issues from a decade ago; they shouldn't be problems now.
But sooner or later backlit LCD/LED/OLED screens will have some type of control / settings which will approximate an e-ink experience.
I'm not so sure it's that simple -- one of e-Ink's great strengths is the battery life, since the screen requires no power except for page turns. It's a one-trick pony, of course, as you by nature don't want a high-refresh rate and so most other applications except for reading books won't work. But the trick is so damn good, I think it'll stick around for a long time to come (or at least for as long as people still care about reading books). Apart from anything else, it's just so damn nice to have a piece of electronic equipment that goes months without needing a charge, even with heavy usage.
Personally, I carry both a 7" tablet and a kindle with me when I travel: I use the tablet for doing tablety-things and the kindle for doing booky-things. They're both so small and light (especially the kindle) that it's no issue carrying both (and if I had to ditch one, it'd be the tablet). Maybe the biggest problem for the kindle is that it does it's job *too* well -- I still have an old kindle keyboard, and haven't felt the need to upgrade; but assuming Amazon are treating them like cheap razors with the ebooks as the blades, I guess that doesn't matter too much.
I run (unofficial) Cyanogenmod and mostly like it, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Every release has a little something important broken. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to the people doing this stuff for free, but when your battery life suddenly gets cut in half and you have to choose between a working camera in the newest release or short battery life, it gets to be a PITA. Plus, it's a time sink...
Seriously -- you're using an unsupported community build of CM with god-knows-what kernel and you think this is a representative experience??
I'm not sure what to say to FUD like that, except that official CM builds are very carefully vetted (there still isn't an official "stable" build of Android 4.2, for example, even six months after the 4.2 codebase was merged and an enormous number of fixes and changes applied since). But I've never seen any issues like what you're complaining about, even running nightly builds (which I've been doing since 2010).
The other major piece of misinformation in your post is claiming it's a time sink. It's not. For some considerable time now, CM has shipped with a CM-updater utility that will (as an option) check regularly for new builds (you can specify whether or not you want nightlies, experimental releases, stable releases included) and will download any updates. On your acceptance of a prompt, the new build will be installed and the device rebooted without the user having to do or manage anything -- it's that simple. No messing about with recovery, no downloading files from XDA, no mess, no fuss. It's all automagic, and it works perfectly, so much so that current builds actually disable the ability to manually reboot into recovery by default. The whole process is just as easy, in fact, as installing an update from your carrier. (But of course, you wouldn't be aware of any of the above as you're not running an official CM build.)
The great thing about open source software is that anyone can take CM's codebase and build their own ROM for any particular unsupported brand of phone. But please don't judge some half-baked, buggy XDA community build with the quality that's coming out of cyanogenmod right now.
Oh, I'd take a phone with 128Gb storage, but I'm not sure it's going to happen any time soon. At least, not from Google while they're still pushing their stupid cloud storage concept ... :(
A few months ago I moved the Dalvik cache onto an Ext3 partition and it helped somewhat. I still have over half of my apps moved to the SD card because everything will not fit.
That's storage space, not RAM. Your Nexus One may suffer from memory constraints as well, but they'll have nothing to do with the number of applications you store on your SD card, or where you put your Dalvik cache ...
... would you prefer the full memory allocation of the browser to be swapped out to disk each time?? If you've got the number of tabs open that I normally have, that's a substantial amount of disk space being taken up (and free space on my phone is generally at a premium, it being one of the non-SD-card-compliant nexii ...)
I'm sure you could write a browser that would do this, but I doubt many people would want to use it ...
I wasn't referring to Keep in particular (which I agree isn't particularly innovative except perhaps in its sheer simplicity, which I do rather appreciate). But the Google cycle of trying lots of new things out and seeing what sticks is something I very much approve of. One thing you have to give Google credit for -- they haven't allowed themselves to stagnate like Apple has in the last few years. And maybe it's all just a ploy to protect their search advertising revenue, but either way the results have been amazing.
Geez, it's called innovation. You try some things out ... some take off, some don't; the ones that work you keep, the ones that don't you ditch. But at least Google keeps trying things out. Would you prefer it if they always just pushed out the same-old, same-old?
Personally, I find that I've stopped using Google's failed offerings (Google Notebook, Google Reader) long before they get officially canned, and I presume most other people have too. But the consolation is that they were only developed through a business model that constantly pushes the envelope -- if Google had been sticking to core services, neither Notebook nor Reader would ever have seen the light of day to being with.
I mean, the IBM 8088AT class computers with giant 5.25 floppy drives had the ability to save text documents...
A 5.25" disk wasn't a giant floppy back in the day, they were the small ones. It was the 8" disks that were giant.
If you still want to carry around physical storage media and do the constant save, copy, save shuffle between your home computer, your work computer and your phone, be my guest. But I'll take the cloud every day and twice on Sundays for its ease and convenience.
(I also, incidentally, have some faith that Google won't resell my personal data, as it would be completely contrary to their best interests. Google's business model involves getting every advertiser to use Google's own algorithms and data to achieve the best ad delivery to customers. Why would Google ever want to give out to others the information that makes it unique? Their plan, as far as I can see, is simple -- keep everyone using Google products for everything, and thus keep advertisers coming to Google. And if even that concept upsets you, you might as well pull the network cable from your computer, destroy your credit cards and have done with it. Paypal, Amazon and my credit card companies probably know more about my life than Google does, and they happen to know my address to boot ...)
My experience with random Android devices is it's hit or miss on rooting. If you have a good OEM (Asus has been good to me) then it's not a problem. But if you have ones that lock it down it's not any different than having an iPhone.
Actually, it's a lot better than what you think (and much better than it used to be several years ago -- I looked into this the other day). Motorola, HTC, Sony and even some of the smaller providers such as Huawei all provide the means to officially unlock the bootloader on many of their phones. Even Samsung provides "Developer Editions" of their major phones that come with an unlocked bootloader by default; and of course every Nexus device is simply a "fastboot oem unlock" away from complete freedom. Impressive, no? There's now an awful lot of devices that you can officially install a custom recovery on and root out of the box, and it's testimony to the strength of the Android dev community that manufacturers actually want to provide this functionality.
Although I wish someone would port apt-get to Android so we can install apps like you can with Cydia.
Well, you don't really need it, unless you have a particular boner for apt-get. Google's own Play Store hosts many apps that do the same thing as those provided by Cydia; since Google has always promoted rooting rather than been adverse to the practice, there's never been a need to have a separate software repository for rooted devices. There are, of course, several other alternate app stores around should you wish to install software through non-Google means and be notified of updates.
so i miss out on google now? who cares
It's not about google now, or app compatibility. It's about having a secure, up-to-date, bug-free OS and the better performance and features that come with new versions of Android. It's probably also worth pointing out that CyanogenMod comes with the ability to update itself -- fully automatically and painlessly -- from within the system settings ... so after the initial rooting and the installation of custom recovery you'll never have to worry about "rooting and tooting" again.
You can root and install CyanogenMod on many phones in less time than it probably took you to write all your posts on this /. article. That doesn't seem much of an investment of time and effort to me, considering everything you gain.
An unlocked bootloader definitely makes it easier. Thankfully, there are quite a few phones with bootloaders than can be unlocked now (I notice both HTC and Samsung have released "developer editions" of their phones with unlocked bootloaders, so kudos to them both), and quite a lot more have known exploits that can be used to effect the same.
However, without Android being open source there's no way a community ROM like CyanogenMod could exist and maintain an up-to-date Android distribution. You certainly couldn't do that with either iOS or Windows Phone.
Not just the radio. An older Nokia phone will easily last 2 weeks in standby mode too. It's the large, backlit, colour screen and the CPU / GPU that drain the battery life in a modern phone far faster than pinging a network tower periodically to let it know you're still active.
No Nokia phone that I owned ever did that! I was lucky to get three days of standby, and never bargained for more than two ...
Seriously, the radio (inc. wifi if on) is by far the heaviest drain on a smartphone. Try putting yours in airplane mode and just use it as a PDA -- I bet you'll be impressed.
Cyanogenmod 10.1 is your friend - Android 4.2.2 on the Nexus S works better than ever ... in fact I'm posting from a Nexus S running it right now.
(why Google decided they could no longer support it, god only knows ... but the beauty of Android being open source means that it doesn't matter)
Microsoft were fined for a reason. Who cares that google complained?
I don't think you quite understand how the tech world has changed. With the rise of Android, iOS and OSX, Microsoft has become the new underdog. It's only right and just to give minority OSes your support when big corporate bullies try to take them down.
Remember the love, people. When new items of hardware are released, make sure the question is asked here on /., "Sure, but can it run Windows??"
No, you just explained why they would NOT. As soon as the government is mandating that a journal publish "all research that is even partially funded by the federal government", then you make it a lower class medium.
Well, not really, as you can have multiple open-access journals -- which is the exact situation that we have at the moment. (There are actually a fair number of open-access journals out there, just not all of them have the same reputation as the PLoS stable. Pity the author of the /. article didn't do his/her research before writing a long and mostly uninformed diatribe.) There's even a new open access journal (eLife) which is trying to set itself up as the Nature/Science of open-access, only taking papers of the very highest quality. We'll see whether or not that works out in a few years' time, when the impact factors get calculated.
The bigger problem is that most papers these days are authored by postdocs, who are under constant pressure to publish in as high-impact journals as possible as quickly as possible. I don't know a single postdoc who has a publication record good enough to be able to "sacrifice" a major paper to a new open-access journal in the hope that in a couple of years that journal might have an excellent reputation -- and I work in one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
But in any case, I'm not sure it really matters. Pretty much every university has access to the major non-free journals, and many of these journals are going down an open-access-after-one-year (or similar time frame) route. Pretty much everyone who could use journal articles has access to them as it is. And I should add that the main premise of this entire article (that the costs of an open access journal are minimal) is incorrect -- journals need editors, both academic editors and copy-editors, to output decent content. These individuals are generally not in the employ of universities, and need a funding source. (Which is the major reason why PLoS and other open-access journals put the costs onto the article authors instead of the readership; eLife is trying a slightly different approach, which is to be supported directly by funding agencies, although the net effect is essentially the same). Whether we fund journals via readership costs or grant costs doesn't change the central point, which is that the money has to come from somewhere.
Not to burst your bubble, but one of the big drawbacks of the Nexus line is the consistent the lack of removable storage -- the last three Nexus phones haven't had a micro-SD slot. Other than that, Nexuses (Nexii?) are wonderful things because they're open by design; but if you really like removable storage you're probably not going to be so happy. I completely agree with you about SD cards, incidentally; it's one of the things I miss in my current phone (a Nexus S -- over two years old, but still going strong).
But I suspect micro-SD slots are a thing of the past now. And on the plus side, you do get a little more security for your data should your phone be stolen (not that a sensible OS couldn't in theory encrypt the SD card storage, but I don't think you can do this on Android.)
(btw, the battery thing may also get you down -- the Nexus 4 doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, either. But, hey, at least it's a cheap phone! :)
Ever try to buy a non-Apple equivalent of MacBook Air?
Just did. It's called a Samsung Series 9 (the 13.3" model) and it's thinner and lighter than a MacBook Air, plus it comes with an amazing IPS screen and it runs Ubuntu perfectly. Looks are subjective and meaningless, of course, but I'd personally also take it over the Air for physical beauty.
Samsung are the new Apple. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but it's the way the world is headed.
Apple sells iPhones outside of the US. What is their global marketshare?
This map may be of interest; mouse-over each country to see the breakdown. Of course, it's web usage stats not sales, so you can probably expect android to be a bit higher than reported as its market share has been increasing. But still, the geographical distribution is fascinating.
WSJ today:
Apple dropped 2.8% to $505.70, after news the tech giant cut its component orders for the iPhone 5 due to weaker-than-expected demand.
... and we're back at the story summary. Circular argument, much? :)
I wonder, what's to stop iPhone 5 users from plugging in a Lightning cable into one of the powered USB ports on this device? Nothing? So why the need to cancel it?
Well, you clearly didn't RTFA. If you had, you'd have read this:
"This is not necessarily the end of the Edison Junior’s portable power project. Siminoff told me that the team will be re-focusing on a device that supports Android phones, tablets, and Apple products, if backers wish to use a Lightning-to-USB connector, or an older 30-pin connector. They’ll only build that device, however, if the crowdfunding community wants it."
The problem was that they'd promised a specific product to their backers, and they couldn't deliver it because Apple pulled the plug (pardon the pun).
Incidentally, what most people are missing is that Apple didn't prevent licensing of the lightning adapter by itself, but rather of the lightning adaptor in combination with other plug options. How crazy is that??
I find Groklaw to be filled with amateur web sleuths who have nothing better to do with their time than to shake their angry fists at successful corporations.
Ah, yes, like the way Groklaw shook its fists at that successful corporation SCO.
A better source of information on patent law is FOSS Patents.
Indeed.
I don't put anything on Google services that I might want to claim copyright on, for similar reasons. Google's TOS includes an unlimited license for them to publish any material that users put on their services:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
To be fair, if you choose to upload your files to Google, they'd be in a lot of trouble if they didn't have a license to host, store and reproduce them. The rest of their terms could be related to the use they make of things designed to be public, such as user-contributed translations. Google's terms of use were a lot better when there were separate terms for separate products; the enveloping of every single Google product under a single TOS (presumably to save on legal redrafting costs for each TOS) has made things seem a lot dodgier. Or it could be them being deliberately evil ... as always, we don't know. It would have been a lot more reassuring if Google had kept individual and separate TOS for all their products.
But I suspect Instagram did genuinely only intend to do what they say in TFA -- to let users willingly promote companies or products that they like. (God knows why people want to do this, but it seems clear from facebook that some people just can't get enough of being unpaid shills for products ...) Instagram got lawyers to draft their new terms of service, and those lawyers came up with the simplest terms to give Instagram the freedom to do what they envisioned. Problem is, of course, that those terms also permit an awful lot more.