Because they were ordered to do so by a Judge. They also implement the Internet Watch Foundation child-porn* blacklist via the same method; filtering on the GET requests. The latter is not required by law, but it was made pretty clear to ISPs that if they didn't do it voluntarily, there would be one.
It's a far cry from the extensive throttling ADSL24 implemented when they couldn't afford enough bandwidth from Entanet to keep up with demand (when my line throughput was dropping below 25% peak capacity on a near daily basis was when I jumped ship; don't know how much they've improved since).
TalkTalk LLU is mostly unthrottled too; they supposedly throttle torrents, but my ubuntu torrents (seriously, the only stuff I torrent) go through at full speed, and not had any problems with any other type of connection I've tried so far, bar Newzbin2 which was court ordered blocked by them too.
that the desktop interface still exists, and that metro is not intended to be used in a desktop environment.
Except it's replaced the start button entirely, and you can't even kill it with the reg hack any more. So as a desktop user, you have 4 choices: 1) pin your most common apps to the taskbar - while I do do that, I use far too many to pin them all; such as the administration tools for servers. 2) have them as shortcuts on the desktop; great until you have an app window covering the icon you want 3) take hand off the mouse to hit start, flip to metro, type the app name you want (yes, I touch type), and flip back to desktop, put hand back on mouse 4) put up with the flipping into metro and back every time you want to launch a frigging app
There's a noticeable delay with the pretty flip window for switching from desktop to metro to desktop; and since certain apps are metrified, you go there anywhere when it launches. It's not as quick, nor as simple as a dock + plus application folder.
Sure, for those people who only use their computer at home for light use - facebook, mail, photos, google search for 'the internet' metro is fine; but they're the people buying ipads in such large numbers anyway, or they buy an ipad to do their light use on the sofa with, and leave the desktop/laptop for the serious business.
At offices, where windows is utterly dominant, metro seems utterly terrible. Not one person, and I mean not one I know has seen the metro interface from where I've been running it on a test rig at the office (I'm the head IT guy) and expressed anything positive - my wife has threatened to divorce me if I put it on her laptop! It's just not a decent tablet interface (too many small fiddly buttons still, such as on ribbons or the non-metro desktop) OR a decent desktop interface; they've taken a really solid OS and frankly ruined it.
The 'push up against the sides/corners for charms, metro shortcut and running apps' gimmick is also a frickin nightmare on virtual machines or RDP - if you run them windowed, as I often do when I'm testing new software rollouts on multiple images, you can't hit the fricking hot corners or edges reliably because of course your cursor goes past the edge of the VM window. If you run fullscreen, you just hit up against the host bringing up ITS UI on screen edges - start bar on a windows host, or the top mac bar on parallels/osx. It is literally rage inducing.
I've been running windows desktop/linux servers as my primary OSes for a good 15 years now. After a couple of weeks with the developer preview, I got so sick of it I built a hackintosh; given my boss is a bit of a machead, it wasn't hard to get him to eventually buy me a mac at the office, and I've now switched to OSX as my primary OS (at home and work) for the first time in my life; save for gaming and a win7 vm for vmware tools/AD work. I've never been a fan of OSX, but it's growing on me; between multiple spaces and a magic touchpad, gitbox, totalfinder, iterm, alfred and sublime text I've grown to find it quite useful, if a bit expensive. And mac mail can go die in a fricking fire for its non-standard attachment handling.
I've been testing the consumer preview of win 8 out today, and it's still just as broken on a VM with the new UX. I'm going to have to force myself to use it so I can support it later, but it's going be a cold day in hell before most of the staff accept it as a replacement for windows 7 on their machines. You thought getting through the switch from office 2003 to 2007 was bad? (We've still a few staff refusing an upgrade to 2010 it was so traumatic, they don't want to go through any more). The switch from win 7 to metro is so jarring, I seriously think we're going to see a lot of users jump ship from windows entirely, myself included.
Alcohol fueled violence (including domestic), along with multi-car accidents. It's not just some drunk driver wrapping himself round a tree, it's wandering into the other lane and hitting someone head on and causing a pile up, or t-boning someone at a light. Car accidents are the highest cause of death of young men (15-24) in the UK; (followed by suicide, I think). They're also the group most likely to drive drunk. The harm stats were not just about fatalities.
The study that showed harm of different drugs was actually a British study; its point was that many illegal drugs are far less harmful than others, including legal ones, and that penalties for drug possession did not tally much with the drug's actual harmful status; with some near harmless drugs ranked with much more harmful ones. And of course, that tobacco and alcohol were right up there with hard drugs in terms of harm.
"Researchers led by Professor David Nutt, a former chief drugs adviser to the British government, asked drug-harm experts to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime."
Because P3P was a pile of crap to begin with, is drastically out of date and long since abandoned by everyone except microsoft?
From wikipedia:
"The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is a protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002. Development ceased shortly thereafter and there have been very few implementations of P3P. Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only major browser to support P3P. The president of TRUSTe has stated that P3P has not been implemented widely due to the difficulty and lack of value."
"P3P manages information through privacy policies. When a website uses P3P, they set up a set of policies that allows them to state their intended uses of personal information that may be gathered from their site visitors. When a user decides to use P3P, they set their own set of policies and state what personal information they will allow to be seen by the sites that they visit. Then when a user visits a site, P3P will compare what personal information the user is willing to release, and what information the server wants to get – if the two do not match, P3P will inform the user and ask if he/she is willing to proceed to the site, and risk giving up more personal information."
P3P can't handle 'legit' cookies not being associated with the domain you're actually viewing. IE requires a P3P policy to exist for 3rd party cookies to be saved when that setting is turned on; google's exists, but just says "this is not a p3p policy", and points you to their privacy policy. IE then goes 'alrighty then, you've got a P3P policy that's utter garbage even though I'm the one that asked for it, but here, go ahead and set that cookie anyway'.
Frankly, Google not respecting Mozilla's DoNotTrack header is a much worse case of ignoring expressed user privacy than this crappy old IE only 'standard' having a loophole you could ride an elephant through.
Well, you could have a manager in charge of purchasing who believes that macs are made of superior components made to a higher specification, and are thus more reliable, despite any evidence to the contrary;
who then stacks the deck for new computers, so that they have to look like an iMac; a screen and mini pc stuck under the desk are not acceptable, as they have "too many cables" - despite that the imac has more visible cables above the desk (sound, power and network) compared to just a display (power and video). So the choice is imacs with applecare, or some crappy imac-a-like with no support contract. And because we can hack windows on there via bootcamp to run all our education software, the extra time to figure out how to deploy the windows partition given imacs don't have pxe support is ITs problem. Eventually used grub4dos and a kernel to nfs boot to our linux partclone deployment system.
We reckon it's just a trojan horse until he can figure out a way to switch us all to OSX, and justify turning the whole place into an apple shop. He seriously believes apple kit is far superior to pc equivalents, thus the price premium. Was a real fight to get real PCs with SSDs and 16GB RAM and 24" screens into the DT department for their CAD requirements. For less than we paid for 21.5" iMacs....
That is how they initially cracked Assassins Creed 2; intercept the traffic, work out all the possible answers, and build a fake server that always gives the right answer. Since the request only has to go to a local port, much faster than the real server.
These days, they've learned to decode the client-side part of the DRM, so just hack the.exe so it doesn't even try to talk to the real servers any more.
Bullshit like is why I've been boycotting all ubisoft games since it came out. Between Assassin's Creed sequels and the Anno series alone, they've lost about 5 full price sales. I'm old enough and earn enough now to buy full price games when I want; what I'm not going to do is piss about wasting my time jumping through the always-on-activation hoops. So their DRM converted a prior release-day paying customer to 0 sales. Shame they don't factor that into the 'piracy is killing our business!' crap.
And if you're American, stinking rich and Republican, you answer
Do you really think a public sewerage system is worse than emptying your bedpan on the street? Anyone who wishes can pay for their waste to be taken away. Those who don't can pay for the finest doctors to treat their cholera. Why should our tax dollars be wasted on something that isn't even shown to be a problem, and destroys those jobs of those who would have gainful jobs as nightsoil collectors for my refuse company? I'm a job creator, and government is proud of being a job destroyer!
Do you really think crossing a public bridge is worse than travelling 200miles out of your way to ford a river?
If there's truly a need, then the private sector will far more efficiently build a bridge with the lowest bidder, and fund it through tolls on the people who use. Far more efficient that some bloated government contract run by union staff who triple their wages and work half the speed, all funded by sucking on the teat of hardworking american taxpayer dollars, who are taxed far too much already.
Trust me, they could spin curing cancer, the invention of a free energy machine and an income tax rate of 0% for 90% of americans as a waste of bloated government stealing money from hard-working, job-creating americans at the behest of pregnant black women and unions, and have a few million Fox viewers believe it.
The argument goes like this: You can't be forced to testify against yourself. You can be forced to provide evidence that may incriminate you - that's the whole point of a warrant. So it's something you know, vs something you have.
So if you had a smartcard to unlock encrypted data, you could be forced to hand it over, same as a safe key.
So what if it's something you know that is the key, like the passphrase or combination to the safe?
Well, as long as the passphrase or combination in itself is not incriminating (i.e. they don't open something you don't own) then it's treated as evidence, not testimony.
If you claim you've forgotten it, and the judge thinks you're lying, then you can be found in contempt of court until you remember, for withholding evidence.
I'm not saying its fair, but it is consistent with prior law and practise.
iBooks 2 content is mostly epub 3 standard, with some custom css extensions for their new fancy stuff, plus of course drm if sold from Apple rather than importing other epub books via itunes. The reader app itself is of course Apple only, and only on the ipad and ipad2 currently I believe.
Anything authored in the iBooks 2 author app on osx can only be sold in Apple's ibook store (with their 30% cut), going by the eula restrictions. So no using it to create the base for epub books for multiple platforms in addition to the ipad.
BUT I'm pretty sure I've been hearing that refrain for several years now.
We've been warning you for several years, because we wanted the transition to dual-stack IPv6 to happen BEFORE we ran out of IPv4 addresses. By the end of this year, all bar a tiny handful of remaining netblocks globally will be allocated to ISPs. After that, there is no more room for device/server/service growth. There will be no more addresses to hand out. It's either carrier-grade NAT for end-users and retasking their IPs for servers, or IPv6 only.
Salvaging the remaining class-A netblocks will take far longer to reclaim than they will to allocate. We're already seeing IPv6 only devices on mobile networks in asia, and carrier-grade NAT on mobile networks in europe. It won't be long now before the same has to happen to end-users on full-fat broadband connections.
IPv6 should have been deployed years ago. That we're this late in process, this close to total IPv4 exhaustion, is rediculous. What could have been a smooth transition is now going to be a massive messy expensive rush crisis of a transition because ISPs couldn't see past their next quarter profit results.
No, actually it's not "useless". There are a shitload of server clusters which run on a single public-facing IP address, but host many, many different sites. How do they perform this "magic"? Why, their load-balancers use this concept called "Network Address Translation" to map the internal, local IP address of each server to the same publicly routable ipv4 address.
Which is all well and good when it's one customer serving up the same site via one IP to all customers with multiple tin boxes.
Does you jack-shit good when you have TWO or more customers both wanting port 80 and 443 to go to two different server clusters serving up different domains because they're you know, entirely unrelated companies - and you don't have any more IPv4 addresses to give them.
We're not there yet, but we're getting much too close to it to be this late in IPv6 deployment.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
Yes, but what when your ISP no longer has any net-routable IPv4 address to give to your router? We're getting closer and closer to that day. On some asian mobile networks, it's already happened.
They can a) buy new equipment to handle carrier-grade NAT, so you end up double-NAT'd on your home network. And what happens when they run out of real IPs again because they're hitting port total limits?
b) replace what remains of their infrastructure that doesn't support IPv6, and start handing out IPv6 addresses blocks to new customers, with an IPv6-4 gateway for legacy websites.
With step a, you largely break VOIP, video conferencing, IM client direct connection, xbox live, steam gaming; any kind of peer-to-peer networking. Cos since you don't control the upstream NAT, no uPnP port-opening for you. Try to have too many customers double-NAT'd behind a single routable address, and you're going to start hitting port-conflicts just for normal web-browsing.
NAT is a hack. Double (carrier grade) NAT is an even bigger hack.
Step B - handing out IPv6 addresses with a 6-4 gateway is basically inevitable at this point. It makes sense to deploy IPv6 to end-users while they still have a large enough pool of IPv4 addresses so they can dual stack. There are no more IPv4 addresses to hand out world-wide. The national registries will have handed them all out to ISPs by the end of this year. Any new ISP, or any growth after that will HAVE to be IPv6.
OK, carrier-grade NAT will buy you a bit of time for end-users, but server hosts won't be able to do that. They're going to have to start going IPv6 only as there won't be the IPv4 addresses to give them; again, this is already happening in asia. And when servers you want to visit are only IPv6, you don't want to be stuck behind a double-NAT'd network, as you won't even be able to setup your own IPv6 tunnel - they will be entirely unaccessible without some form of dual-stack proxy.
carrier grade NAT will be slow, and crippled and subject to your ISP having a decent proxy. They can't even provide decent DNS servers!
IPv6 works, it's available now. The only thing you need to do is get your ISP to use it instead of carrier grade NAT; and if they won't, switch to one that will. Or the next few years are going to see your 'net connection get progressively more and more broken.
It's a feature request/design change, not a bug. One that changes the layout of the browser quite considerably by shifting the tabs below the url bar; which given that's where addons and bookmarks live, may well have other impacts on the code.
Google have decided that they don't want to implement such a design option, even if that annoys the 602 people who've starred the bug report. C'est la vie.
In the UK at least, the prices are set by the distributor, not the cinema chain. The distributor also takes almost all the money; 90% of the ticket price for blockbusters in the first week, then it drops slowly over time. The cinema gets more percentage of the ticket from longer running films, and smaller brand films, but of course ticket sales are lower for smaller films and ones at end of run, so they barely if at all cover their running costs for projecting the film.
Cinemas aren't in the film showing business. They're in the expensive popcorn and drinks business. The films are just an excuse to get you to buy from the concessions stand. It's the distributor, and thus the studios who care about the ticket prices, and it's a lot simpler for them to charge the same price for all films all the time than to try and manage prices on a film-by-film basis, especially given the way contracts are drawn up well in advance for what will show where and for how long.
You know you can factory reset android from right in the system settings, which will leave your data on the internal sdcard, but wipe all apps and settings? Then you just re-add your google account, which pulls back in contacts, calendar and email, then reinstall your wanted apps via the market.
There are backup apps to shorten this process if you're in the habit of flashing new custom roms, but it's still pretty quick even without them.
If they leave things unlocked too much, they will lose a few bucks from people removing the bloatware from their phones and enabling features the carriers were careful to disable.
Ummm. Pretty much all the android phones, bar a few outliers, have custom roms available with bloatware stripped already available. ICS is being built for a bunch of devices ahead/instead of official roms to boot. HTC just released their bootloader unlocker to make it easier to root their phones if desired.
You get 15 minutes to refund any app after purchase. It used to be 24 hours; which I did use several times when an app was misrepresented as to what it could actually do. In the market app (or website) after you've bought an app, the buttons change to 'open' and 'uninstall and refund'; after 15 minutes the latter just becomes 'uninstall'. I think you're not actually billed until the 15 minutes is up, similar to google checkout order cancellation. Given it's not really a big enough windows to trial an app, but is more for accidental purchases, it does have its uses, but I've largely resorted to only buying apps that have a free trial version, or possibly piracy if it's an expensive one. There are no pirated apps on my phone - anything worth using was purchased, anything not was uninstalled. It's not like they're expensive.
You can also sometimes get apps refunded by the dev after this window; a friend was having problems with his google apps account purchases, so switched to a vanilla gmail account, and wanted to move his apps across. He emailed all the devs of his purchased apps, and most of them refunded his original purchase no questions asked, and he then rebought them on his new account. Kudos to them for being so helpful.
It's not the money that's irritating though if I make a dud purchase - it's having the app clutter up the 'my apps' list, sitting there permanently in the 'uninstalled' column, getting in the way if I want to reinstall a rarely used app, and constantly reminding me I got ripped of. That's far, far more annoying that the couple of quid I wasted. Free apps/ad supported I can disappear if they're not for me. Unwanted paid apps irritate me forever.
M-edge stuff is available on the Amazon UK store just fine; maybe Amazon Europe is being less evil. I have two m edge cases for kindle 3s, plus the associated light. They are great and do exactly what they should. Good build quality and half the price of the Amazon own brand stuff. I hope m-edge nail Amazon to the wall over this if even a fraction of it is true.
And in every company I've ever worked, going above and beyond resulted In absolutely nothing back. Pay rises go on nepotism and to suck ups, not to those actually doing the most or best work. The only person getting a promotion is the manager, and then you get told how to suck eggs by his replacement until he figures out you do actually know your arse from a hole in the ground.
I generally get on well with my managers, especially the ones that actually good at their job instead of just telling me how to do mine, which is about half of them.
I've long since given up believing that all that unpaid overtime I put in to keep the show running with half the manpower it actually needs actually is anything other than a mugs game. but then I'm a sucker for caring about whether I do a good job. I can't knowingly do it half arsed even when I wish I could so I could go home. Case in point; my boss texted me on xmas morning because email was down, and he wanted out fixed right then and there, despite the entire company bring on holiday for another week (private school). And that we have no on call or out of hours support requirements. He pulled my mobile number from the emergency contacts file for life or death situations. Fortunately he just ducked up his iPhone and email was fine. I know this because I checked. On xmas day while on holiday in another country with my wifes family.
My reward? A meeting to discus how we can avoid this 'gap in our defences', I.e. have us do official unpaid on call duty over xmas. When I already had to cash in one week of holiday as I never got the opportunity to use it due to the same manager booking new it purchases during school holidays which is the only time we're allowed to take our legally required minimum.
And yes, I could get another job; in a shitty economy, and what's the point when it'll just be the same there?
To the original question Asker; you did the work without being asked, when you knew there was no money for it. Your odds of getting paid for it are basically nil.
You may however be able to trade it for some extra time off holiday, or something else you want, such as time or opportunity to do skill training in an area you want to learn more. Be flexible, and if your manager is half decent, he'll at least try to chuck you a bone.
If not, you might as well cough up the code. At least it'll make your co workers life easier, and friends are all you have in the workplace, the company itself won't give a monkeys.
And lesson learned for next time. If you're going to do work for nothing because you can, at least do it with your eyes open.
They were an exception because apple were coming directly from a position of strength - the ipod + itunes combo was incredibly popular (and still is for people who don't want or can't afford an iphone) and demonstrated apple were capable of making desirable consumer products. The idea of an ipod with phone service and 3g was always going to be a mega seller in the USA even if it was completely non functional in a number of areas compared to the Asian competition. (cut n paste, native apps, multitasking, decent browser were all missing in the first iteration for example). That gave apple the ability to force what terms they wanted on the carriers and not have them retaliate by ignoring it.
There was also a dire lack of decent smartphones in the US due to the broken carrier system of forced contracts, so while hardly a first mover, they did get a significant number of ordinary people buying them, whereas nerds and business men were the main buyers of smartphones before that. The first iphone did far less well in Europe, for example, where better handsets were available.
Microsoft has none of these advantages. They have a negative rep after windows mobile 6 and 6.5, the zune was a failure, and nobody trusts Microsoft not to pull a fast one. Plus 5 years on, the smart phone market has matured, amd between ios, android and blackberry there's a lot of stiff competition.
If they'd come out with windows mobile 7 sooner, and put some of their muscle into a top notch app ecosystem filled with quality apps - perhaps through a subsidized developer program, and paid the carriers kickbacks in joint marketing or whatever, they might have stood a chance.
As it is with limited marketing, a small developer base and app collection, so-so hardware and an OS that is reasonable but nothing particularly amazing, plus the bad rep Microsoft has, why would anyone with a memory of more than 5 minutes want one? They had to buy Nokia just to get someone to build the dam things!
To get traction now, they don't just have to equal ios and android in functionality; they have to utterly obliterate them. And Microsoft doesn't have the r and d history in the hardware or mobile os space to do that. And with ballmer at the helm they certainly don't have the vision.
About their only option is to forget going after the consumer/ facebook market for now, and go all guns out for blackberry as business phones. Top notch mail, integrate into exchange link, use Skype tech for video conference, make remote management and security easy and cheap for it departments and governance for management, especially small businesses who are basically ignored for that sort of function at the moment.
Make windows mobile a powerful, secure and easy to use - and cheap - system for business, and offer an alternative to bring your own iphone, which is such a headache for security compliance. How did microsoft let blackberry be better than them at connecting to exchange in the first place? Apple doesn't give 2 shits for business anymore, they're full on conversation into a consumer electronics business so you're safe from competition from that quarter.
But trying to take on apple and the massive Asian android oems in the consumer market, with such a late start, negative pr, no developers and pissed off carriers?
The question isn't why windows phone is failing, its what moron thought it stood a chance in the first place.
If you take many laptops, and chop off the keyboard, you get something that looks a lot like an ipad; black surround, few/no screws, round corners. About the only thing missing is the bezel flush with screen, but some laptops do that and it's not like it wasn't an existing idea from touchscreen phones - including ones that predate the iphone. There were already tablets going this way - such as the joojoo that predated the ipad, and looked a lot like what the ipad eventually launched as - but what was lacking was a suitable touch based OS that scaled to a 10" screen size with only soft keyboard, which is why so many of the pre-ipad tablets were windows+ rotaty hardware keyboard based.
What apple proved is that people would be happy with what was basically an oversized phone, rather than a scaled down laptop, which was really the only revolutionary bit of the idea - other tech companies thought people actually wanted at least netbook levels of function. As it turns out - and I have an android transformer which I love, so take from that what you will - browser, email, twitter, facebook and some games was all that most people actually wanted from a tablet.
But that apple owns the idea of a flat black rectangle with rounded corners and a speaker on the front is just nuts. When you look at what samsung did for the german injunction - basically wrap more of the silver surround onto the front - it just shows how ludicrous it is.
but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that
Why? If you assume that most of that money goes into paying for engineers and developers and distribution costs, why is it axiomatic that they must also be employed by google? If the work is good, and gets additional users to use a quickly developing browser instead of say, IE6, then mission accomplished. Firefox takes different decisions and has different emphasis than google, so if your stated goal is a well developed advancing client base, it makes sense to fund a 'competitor' in that the two different projects with different histories will meet the needs of more people than a single browser team can. Firefox has built up a lot of trust by ordinary users the last few years, a number of whom don't trust google enough to install their browser. It wasn't safari or opera that broke the back of the IE dominance, it was mozilla by offering a markedly more functional browser - and that has forced microsoft to resume work on their browser and compete again.
And after all, google tries to make advanced, compelling web apps in order to plonk adverts in as front as many eyes as possible. As any web developer who's had to build their site, and then break bits of it for IE6 in the last decade can appreciate, advanced browsers make it a hell of a lot easier to do that regardless of the name in the titlebar. And this is what microsoft feared and tried to stop for years - web-based, standards compliant advanced apps that run on any platform. When the browser is the platform, who cares what OS it runs on; and thus who needs to keep paying such extortionate prices for windows, and by extension, office? Obviously we're not there yet, and there will always be heavy duty stuff that can't be OS agnostic, but for most people, most of the time, it's becoming far less important what OS you have as long as it runs say, webmail, facebook and whatever sites you personally hang out on. We've cloud books, cloud music, cloud films, cloud email, cloud document apps, cloud productivity apps of whatever stripe, online banking, social networking, cloud photos, the list just keeps on growing. Just look at the roaring growth of smartphones, netbooks and tablets - most of what they're used for is a browser, apps that's basically some form-factor specific UI that gets or dumps everything onto some html5 website, or games.
Competition is good, and it means that people who aren't google can come up with ideas that we can all then benefit from, including google themselves. It's good that google themselves realise that.
The removal of the menu button only applies to the virtual buttons on the galaxy nexus, and honeycomb tablets that were already missing it. If you have physical buttons on your phone (including capacitive 'soft' pre-printed buttons) they're not going anywhere in ICS. The galaxy S has menu, home and back buttons that work just fine in ICS (and no virtual buttons like the galaxy nexus), and seeing that the nexus S has soft buttons, they're staying too (just confirmed that here [zdnet.com]). So until you upgrade to an ICS only phone that doesn't have dedicated buttons, you're fine. Even brand new phones like the droid razr have capacitive buttons due to launching with gingerbread. The galaxy nexus has such a huge screen they can afford to use virtual buttons like a tablet, but physical dedicated buttons are going to be around for a while yet on phones.
But I agree entirely that the moving around of the menu button inside apps is a bit irritating at time on honeycomb.
The toggles in notification shelf were never in stock builds, it's a Samsung thing. And yes, it's quite convenient.
Hah, never realised that. So samsung managed to improve something on android instead of make it worse? That's a first! Testing Notification Toggle now, and seems to do what it says on the tin, so thanks for that!
Couldn't agree more about the stock browser on the transformer; it's utter pants. On mine, it lets you do bookmarks, and they show up when typing in urls, but there's none listed under the bookmark tab. The dodgy text-input area, plus the insistance on putting proper urls through google search first (unless you manually put http:/// meant I long since switched to dolphinHD, then opera after the privacy webzine hoohah on dolphin.
Even in hacked-up beta stage, ICS on the galaxy S is damned impressive - it's faster than gingerbread, even without some GPU compositing for transitions. The browser is really really good, and dear god it's fast. Compare to putting iOS 5 on an iphone 3GS (the iphone that was out when I bought my galaxy S) which grinds it to a near halt, ICS is a big step forward in so many areas. Some of the functions (such as the running tasks) is clearly an evolution of honeycomb, but it always seemed rushed just to get something out on tablets, and isn't as slick as it should be. Can't wait to get it on my transformer too; I think the ICS version of the new tegra3 transformer will be a tablet that is honestly better than the ipad2 - though I love my current tranny, the ipad still edges it.
I'm tempted by a Galaxy Nexus now my contract term is coming up, but I'd miss the external microSD slot, especially as the 32GB version isn't shipping in the UK. Maybe the galaxy S3 (if it has a similar gorgeous high-dpi screen) will convert me, but ICS on the galaxy S is good enough for now!
Slashdot Mirror
Because they were ordered to do so by a Judge. They also implement the Internet Watch Foundation child-porn* blacklist via the same method; filtering on the GET requests. The latter is not required by law, but it was made pretty clear to ISPs that if they didn't do it voluntarily, there would be one.
It's a far cry from the extensive throttling ADSL24 implemented when they couldn't afford enough bandwidth from Entanet to keep up with demand (when my line throughput was dropping below 25% peak capacity on a near daily basis was when I jumped ship; don't know how much they've improved since).
TalkTalk LLU is mostly unthrottled too; they supposedly throttle torrents, but my ubuntu torrents (seriously, the only stuff I torrent) go through at full speed, and not had any problems with any other type of connection I've tried so far, bar Newzbin2 which was court ordered blocked by them too.
*Well, *mostly* child porn
that the desktop interface still exists, and that metro is not intended to be used in a desktop environment.
Except it's replaced the start button entirely, and you can't even kill it with the reg hack any more. So as a desktop user, you have 4 choices:
1) pin your most common apps to the taskbar - while I do do that, I use far too many to pin them all; such as the administration tools for servers.
2) have them as shortcuts on the desktop; great until you have an app window covering the icon you want
3) take hand off the mouse to hit start, flip to metro, type the app name you want (yes, I touch type), and flip back to desktop, put hand back on mouse
4) put up with the flipping into metro and back every time you want to launch a frigging app
There's a noticeable delay with the pretty flip window for switching from desktop to metro to desktop; and since certain apps are metrified, you go there anywhere when it launches. It's not as quick, nor as simple as a dock + plus application folder.
Sure, for those people who only use their computer at home for light use - facebook, mail, photos, google search for 'the internet' metro is fine; but they're the people buying ipads in such large numbers anyway, or they buy an ipad to do their light use on the sofa with, and leave the desktop/laptop for the serious business.
At offices, where windows is utterly dominant, metro seems utterly terrible. Not one person, and I mean not one I know has seen the metro interface from where I've been running it on a test rig at the office (I'm the head IT guy) and expressed anything positive - my wife has threatened to divorce me if I put it on her laptop! It's just not a decent tablet interface (too many small fiddly buttons still, such as on ribbons or the non-metro desktop) OR a decent desktop interface; they've taken a really solid OS and frankly ruined it.
The 'push up against the sides/corners for charms, metro shortcut and running apps' gimmick is also a frickin nightmare on virtual machines or RDP - if you run them windowed, as I often do when I'm testing new software rollouts on multiple images, you can't hit the fricking hot corners or edges reliably because of course your cursor goes past the edge of the VM window. If you run fullscreen, you just hit up against the host bringing up ITS UI on screen edges - start bar on a windows host, or the top mac bar on parallels/osx. It is literally rage inducing.
I've been running windows desktop/linux servers as my primary OSes for a good 15 years now. After a couple of weeks with the developer preview, I got so sick of it I built a hackintosh; given my boss is a bit of a machead, it wasn't hard to get him to eventually buy me a mac at the office, and I've now switched to OSX as my primary OS (at home and work) for the first time in my life; save for gaming and a win7 vm for vmware tools/AD work. I've never been a fan of OSX, but it's growing on me; between multiple spaces and a magic touchpad, gitbox, totalfinder, iterm, alfred and sublime text I've grown to find it quite useful, if a bit expensive. And mac mail can go die in a fricking fire for its non-standard attachment handling.
I've been testing the consumer preview of win 8 out today, and it's still just as broken on a VM with the new UX. I'm going to have to force myself to use it so I can support it later, but it's going be a cold day in hell before most of the staff accept it as a replacement for windows 7 on their machines. You thought getting through the switch from office 2003 to 2007 was bad? (We've still a few staff refusing an upgrade to 2010 it was so traumatic, they don't want to go through any more). The switch from win 7 to metro is so jarring, I seriously think we're going to see a lot of users jump ship from windows entirely, myself included.
Alcohol fueled violence (including domestic), along with multi-car accidents. It's not just some drunk driver wrapping himself round a tree, it's wandering into the other lane and hitting someone head on and causing a pile up, or t-boning someone at a light. Car accidents are the highest cause of death of young men (15-24) in the UK; (followed by suicide, I think). They're also the group most likely to drive drunk. The harm stats were not just about fatalities.
The study that showed harm of different drugs was actually a British study; its point was that many illegal drugs are far less harmful than others, including legal ones, and that penalties for drug possession did not tally much with the drug's actual harmful status; with some near harmless drugs ranked with much more harmful ones. And of course, that tobacco and alcohol were right up there with hard drugs in terms of harm.
"Researchers led by Professor David Nutt, a former chief drugs adviser to the British government, asked drug-harm experts to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm
Because P3P was a pile of crap to begin with, is drastically out of date and long since abandoned by everyone except microsoft?
From wikipedia:
"The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is a protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002. Development ceased shortly thereafter and there have been very few implementations of P3P. Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only major browser to support P3P. The president of TRUSTe has stated that P3P has not been implemented widely due to the difficulty and lack of value."
"P3P manages information through privacy policies. When a website uses P3P, they set up a set of policies that allows them to state their intended uses of personal information that may be gathered from their site visitors. When a user decides to use P3P, they set their own set of policies and state what personal information they will allow to be seen by the sites that they visit. Then when a user visits a site, P3P will compare what personal information the user is willing to release, and what information the server wants to get – if the two do not match, P3P will inform the user and ask if he/she is willing to proceed to the site, and risk giving up more personal information."
P3P can't handle 'legit' cookies not being associated with the domain you're actually viewing. IE requires a P3P policy to exist for 3rd party cookies to be saved when that setting is turned on; google's exists, but just says "this is not a p3p policy", and points you to their privacy policy. IE then goes 'alrighty then, you've got a P3P policy that's utter garbage even though I'm the one that asked for it, but here, go ahead and set that cookie anyway'.
Frankly, Google not respecting Mozilla's DoNotTrack header is a much worse case of ignoring expressed user privacy than this crappy old IE only 'standard' having a loophole you could ride an elephant through.
Well, you could have a manager in charge of purchasing who believes that macs are made of superior components made to a higher specification, and are thus more reliable, despite any evidence to the contrary;
who then stacks the deck for new computers, so that they have to look like an iMac; a screen and mini pc stuck under the desk are not acceptable, as they have "too many cables" - despite that the imac has more visible cables above the desk (sound, power and network) compared to just a display (power and video). So the choice is imacs with applecare, or some crappy imac-a-like with no support contract. And because we can hack windows on there via bootcamp to run all our education software, the extra time to figure out how to deploy the windows partition given imacs don't have pxe support is ITs problem. Eventually used grub4dos and a kernel to nfs boot to our linux partclone deployment system.
We reckon it's just a trojan horse until he can figure out a way to switch us all to OSX, and justify turning the whole place into an apple shop. He seriously believes apple kit is far superior to pc equivalents, thus the price premium. Was a real fight to get real PCs with SSDs and 16GB RAM and 24" screens into the DT department for their CAD requirements. For less than we paid for 21.5" iMacs....
That is how they initially cracked Assassins Creed 2; intercept the traffic, work out all the possible answers, and build a fake server that always gives the right answer. Since the request only has to go to a local port, much faster than the real server.
These days, they've learned to decode the client-side part of the DRM, so just hack the .exe so it doesn't even try to talk to the real servers any more.
Bullshit like is why I've been boycotting all ubisoft games since it came out. Between Assassin's Creed sequels and the Anno series alone, they've lost about 5 full price sales. I'm old enough and earn enough now to buy full price games when I want; what I'm not going to do is piss about wasting my time jumping through the always-on-activation hoops. So their DRM converted a prior release-day paying customer to 0 sales. Shame they don't factor that into the 'piracy is killing our business!' crap.
And if you're American, stinking rich and Republican, you answer
Do you really think a public sewerage system is worse than emptying your bedpan on the street?
Anyone who wishes can pay for their waste to be taken away. Those who don't can pay for the finest doctors to treat their cholera. Why should our tax dollars be wasted on something that isn't even shown to be a problem, and destroys those jobs of those who would have gainful jobs as nightsoil collectors for my refuse company? I'm a job creator, and government is proud of being a job destroyer!
Do you really think crossing a public bridge is worse than travelling 200miles out of your way to ford a river?
If there's truly a need, then the private sector will far more efficiently build a bridge with the lowest bidder, and fund it through tolls on the people who use. Far more efficient that some bloated government contract run by union staff who triple their wages and work half the speed, all funded by sucking on the teat of hardworking american taxpayer dollars, who are taxed far too much already.
Trust me, they could spin curing cancer, the invention of a free energy machine and an income tax rate of 0% for 90% of americans as a waste of bloated government stealing money from hard-working, job-creating americans at the behest of pregnant black women and unions, and have a few million Fox viewers believe it.
The argument goes like this:
You can't be forced to testify against yourself. You can be forced to provide evidence that may incriminate you - that's the whole point of a warrant.
So it's something you know, vs something you have.
So if you had a smartcard to unlock encrypted data, you could be forced to hand it over, same as a safe key.
So what if it's something you know that is the key, like the passphrase or combination to the safe?
Well, as long as the passphrase or combination in itself is not incriminating (i.e. they don't open something you don't own) then it's treated as evidence, not testimony.
If you claim you've forgotten it, and the judge thinks you're lying, then you can be found in contempt of court until you remember, for withholding evidence.
I'm not saying its fair, but it is consistent with prior law and practise.
iBooks 2 content is mostly epub 3 standard, with some custom css extensions for their new fancy stuff, plus of course drm if sold from Apple rather than importing other epub books via itunes.
The reader app itself is of course Apple only, and only on the ipad and ipad2 currently I believe.
Anything authored in the iBooks 2 author app on osx can only be sold in Apple's ibook store (with their 30% cut), going by the eula restrictions. So no using it to create the base for epub books for multiple platforms in addition to the ipad.
BUT I'm pretty sure I've been hearing that refrain for several years now.
We've been warning you for several years, because we wanted the transition to dual-stack IPv6 to happen BEFORE we ran out of IPv4 addresses. By the end of this year, all bar a tiny handful of remaining netblocks globally will be allocated to ISPs. After that, there is no more room for device/server/service growth. There will be no more addresses to hand out. It's either carrier-grade NAT for end-users and retasking their IPs for servers, or IPv6 only.
Salvaging the remaining class-A netblocks will take far longer to reclaim than they will to allocate. We're already seeing IPv6 only devices on mobile networks in asia, and carrier-grade NAT on mobile networks in europe. It won't be long now before the same has to happen to end-users on full-fat broadband connections.
IPv6 should have been deployed years ago. That we're this late in process, this close to total IPv4 exhaustion, is rediculous. What could have been a smooth transition is now going to be a massive messy expensive rush crisis of a transition because ISPs couldn't see past their next quarter profit results.
No, actually it's not "useless". There are a shitload of server clusters which run on a single public-facing IP address, but host many, many different sites. How do they perform this "magic"? Why, their load-balancers use this concept called "Network Address Translation" to map the internal, local IP address of each server to the same publicly routable ipv4 address.
Which is all well and good when it's one customer serving up the same site via one IP to all customers with multiple tin boxes.
Does you jack-shit good when you have TWO or more customers both wanting port 80 and 443 to go to two different server clusters serving up different domains because they're you know, entirely unrelated companies - and you don't have any more IPv4 addresses to give them.
We're not there yet, but we're getting much too close to it to be this late in IPv6 deployment.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
Yes, but what when your ISP no longer has any net-routable IPv4 address to give to your router? We're getting closer and closer to that day. On some asian mobile networks, it's already happened.
They can
a) buy new equipment to handle carrier-grade NAT, so you end up double-NAT'd on your home network. And what happens when they run out of real IPs again because they're hitting port total limits?
b) replace what remains of their infrastructure that doesn't support IPv6, and start handing out IPv6 addresses blocks to new customers, with an IPv6-4 gateway for legacy websites.
With step a, you largely break VOIP, video conferencing, IM client direct connection, xbox live, steam gaming; any kind of peer-to-peer networking. Cos since you don't control the upstream NAT, no uPnP port-opening for you. Try to have too many customers double-NAT'd behind a single routable address, and you're going to start hitting port-conflicts just for normal web-browsing.
NAT is a hack. Double (carrier grade) NAT is an even bigger hack.
Step B - handing out IPv6 addresses with a 6-4 gateway is basically inevitable at this point. It makes sense to deploy IPv6 to end-users while they still have a large enough pool of IPv4 addresses so they can dual stack. There are no more IPv4 addresses to hand out world-wide. The national registries will have handed them all out to ISPs by the end of this year. Any new ISP, or any growth after that will HAVE to be IPv6.
OK, carrier-grade NAT will buy you a bit of time for end-users, but server hosts won't be able to do that. They're going to have to start going IPv6 only as there won't be the IPv4 addresses to give them; again, this is already happening in asia. And when servers you want to visit are only IPv6, you don't want to be stuck behind a double-NAT'd network, as you won't even be able to setup your own IPv6 tunnel - they will be entirely unaccessible without some form of dual-stack proxy.
carrier grade NAT will be slow, and crippled and subject to your ISP having a decent proxy. They can't even provide decent DNS servers!
IPv6 works, it's available now. The only thing you need to do is get your ISP to use it instead of carrier grade NAT; and if they won't, switch to one that will. Or the next few years are going to see your 'net connection get progressively more and more broken.
It's a feature request/design change, not a bug. One that changes the layout of the browser quite considerably by shifting the tabs below the url bar; which given that's where addons and bookmarks live, may well have other impacts on the code.
Google have decided that they don't want to implement such a design option, even if that annoys the 602 people who've starred the bug report. C'est la vie.
In the UK at least, the prices are set by the distributor, not the cinema chain. The distributor also takes almost all the money; 90% of the ticket price for blockbusters in the first week, then it drops slowly over time. The cinema gets more percentage of the ticket from longer running films, and smaller brand films, but of course ticket sales are lower for smaller films and ones at end of run, so they barely if at all cover their running costs for projecting the film.
Cinemas aren't in the film showing business. They're in the expensive popcorn and drinks business. The films are just an excuse to get you to buy from the concessions stand. It's the distributor, and thus the studios who care about the ticket prices, and it's a lot simpler for them to charge the same price for all films all the time than to try and manage prices on a film-by-film basis, especially given the way contracts are drawn up well in advance for what will show where and for how long.
You know you can factory reset android from right in the system settings, which will leave your data on the internal sdcard, but wipe all apps and settings? Then you just re-add your google account, which pulls back in contacts, calendar and email, then reinstall your wanted apps via the market.
There are backup apps to shorten this process if you're in the habit of flashing new custom roms, but it's still pretty quick even without them.
If they leave things unlocked too much, they will lose a few bucks from people removing the bloatware from their phones and enabling features the carriers were careful to disable.
Ummm. Pretty much all the android phones, bar a few outliers, have custom roms available with bloatware stripped already available. ICS is being built for a bunch of devices ahead/instead of official roms to boot. HTC just released their bootloader unlocker to make it easier to root their phones if desired.
You get 15 minutes to refund any app after purchase. It used to be 24 hours; which I did use several times when an app was misrepresented as to what it could actually do. In the market app (or website) after you've bought an app, the buttons change to 'open' and 'uninstall and refund'; after 15 minutes the latter just becomes 'uninstall'. I think you're not actually billed until the 15 minutes is up, similar to google checkout order cancellation. Given it's not really a big enough windows to trial an app, but is more for accidental purchases, it does have its uses, but I've largely resorted to only buying apps that have a free trial version, or possibly piracy if it's an expensive one. There are no pirated apps on my phone - anything worth using was purchased, anything not was uninstalled. It's not like they're expensive.
You can also sometimes get apps refunded by the dev after this window; a friend was having problems with his google apps account purchases, so switched to a vanilla gmail account, and wanted to move his apps across. He emailed all the devs of his purchased apps, and most of them refunded his original purchase no questions asked, and he then rebought them on his new account. Kudos to them for being so helpful.
It's not the money that's irritating though if I make a dud purchase - it's having the app clutter up the 'my apps' list, sitting there permanently in the 'uninstalled' column, getting in the way if I want to reinstall a rarely used app, and constantly reminding me I got ripped of. That's far, far more annoying that the couple of quid I wasted. Free apps/ad supported I can disappear if they're not for me. Unwanted paid apps irritate me forever.
M-edge stuff is available on the Amazon UK store just fine; maybe Amazon Europe is being less evil. I have two m edge cases for kindle 3s, plus the associated light. They are great and do exactly what they should. Good build quality and half the price of the Amazon own brand stuff. I hope m-edge nail Amazon to the wall over this if even a fraction of it is true.
Apologies for typos above; new smartphone, and the autocorrect is a lot more aggressive.
And in every company I've ever worked, going above and beyond resulted In absolutely nothing back. Pay rises go on nepotism and to suck ups, not to those actually doing the most or best work. The only person getting a promotion is the manager, and then you get told how to suck eggs by his replacement until he figures out you do actually know your arse from a hole in the ground.
I generally get on well with my managers, especially the ones that actually good at their job instead of just telling me how to do mine, which is about half of them.
I've long since given up believing that all that unpaid overtime I put in to keep the show running with half the manpower it actually needs actually is anything other than a mugs game. but then I'm a sucker for caring about whether I do a good job. I can't knowingly do it half arsed even when I wish I could so I could go home. Case in point; my boss texted me on xmas morning because email was down, and he wanted out fixed right then and there, despite the entire company bring on holiday for another week (private school). And that we have no on call or out of hours support requirements. He pulled my mobile number from the emergency contacts file for life or death situations. Fortunately he just ducked up his iPhone and email was fine. I know this because I checked. On xmas day while on holiday in another country with my wifes family.
My reward? A meeting to discus how we can avoid this 'gap in our defences', I.e. have us do official unpaid on call duty over xmas. When I already had to cash in one week of holiday as I never got the opportunity to use it due to the same manager booking new it purchases during school holidays which is the only time we're allowed to take our legally required minimum.
And yes, I could get another job; in a shitty economy, and what's the point when it'll just be the same there?
To the original question Asker; you did the work without being asked, when you knew there was no money for it. Your odds of getting paid for it are basically nil.
You may however be able to trade it for some extra time off holiday, or something else you want, such as time or opportunity to do skill training in an area you want to learn more. Be flexible, and if your manager is half decent, he'll at least try to chuck you a bone.
If not, you might as well cough up the code. At least it'll make your co workers life easier, and friends are all you have in the workplace, the company itself won't give a monkeys.
And lesson learned for next time. If you're going to do work for nothing because you can, at least do it with your eyes open.
They were an exception because apple were coming directly from a position of strength - the ipod + itunes combo was incredibly popular (and still is for people who don't want or can't afford an iphone) and demonstrated apple were capable of making desirable consumer products. The idea of an ipod with phone service and 3g was always going to be a mega seller in the USA even if it was completely non functional in a number of areas compared to the Asian competition. (cut n paste, native apps, multitasking, decent browser were all missing in the first iteration for example). That gave apple the ability to force what terms they wanted on the carriers and not have them retaliate by ignoring it.
There was also a dire lack of decent smartphones in the US due to the broken carrier system of forced contracts, so while hardly a first mover, they did get a significant number of ordinary people buying them, whereas nerds and business men were the main buyers of smartphones before that. The first iphone did far less well in Europe, for example, where better handsets were available.
Microsoft has none of these advantages. They have a negative rep after windows mobile 6 and 6.5, the zune was a failure, and nobody trusts Microsoft not to pull a fast one. Plus 5 years on, the smart phone market has matured, amd between ios, android and blackberry there's a lot of stiff competition.
If they'd come out with windows mobile 7 sooner, and put some of their muscle into a top notch app ecosystem filled with quality apps - perhaps through a subsidized developer program, and paid the carriers kickbacks in joint marketing or whatever, they might have stood a chance.
As it is with limited marketing, a small developer base and app collection, so-so hardware and an OS that is reasonable but nothing particularly amazing, plus the bad rep Microsoft has, why would anyone with a memory of more than 5 minutes want one? They had to buy Nokia just to get someone to build the dam things!
To get traction now, they don't just have to equal ios and android in functionality; they have to utterly obliterate them. And Microsoft doesn't have the r and d history in the hardware or mobile os space to do that. And with ballmer at the helm they certainly don't have the vision.
About their only option is to forget going after the consumer/ facebook market for now, and go all guns out for blackberry as business phones. Top notch mail, integrate into exchange link, use Skype tech for video conference, make remote management and security easy and cheap for it departments and governance for management, especially small businesses who are basically ignored for that sort of function at the moment.
Make windows mobile a powerful, secure and easy to use - and cheap - system for business, and offer an alternative to bring your own iphone, which is such a headache for security compliance. How did microsoft let blackberry be better than them at connecting to exchange in the first place? Apple doesn't give 2 shits for business anymore, they're full on conversation into a consumer electronics business so you're safe from competition from that quarter.
But trying to take on apple and the massive Asian android oems in the consumer market, with such a late start, negative pr, no developers and pissed off carriers?
The question isn't why windows phone is failing, its what moron thought it stood a chance in the first place.
If you take many laptops, and chop off the keyboard, you get something that looks a lot like an ipad; black surround, few/no screws, round corners. About the only thing missing is the bezel flush with screen, but some laptops do that and it's not like it wasn't an existing idea from touchscreen phones - including ones that predate the iphone. There were already tablets going this way - such as the joojoo that predated the ipad, and looked a lot like what the ipad eventually launched as - but what was lacking was a suitable touch based OS that scaled to a 10" screen size with only soft keyboard, which is why so many of the pre-ipad tablets were windows+ rotaty hardware keyboard based.
What apple proved is that people would be happy with what was basically an oversized phone, rather than a scaled down laptop, which was really the only revolutionary bit of the idea - other tech companies thought people actually wanted at least netbook levels of function. As it turns out - and I have an android transformer which I love, so take from that what you will - browser, email, twitter, facebook and some games was all that most people actually wanted from a tablet.
But that apple owns the idea of a flat black rectangle with rounded corners and a speaker on the front is just nuts. When you look at what samsung did for the german injunction - basically wrap more of the silver surround onto the front - it just shows how ludicrous it is.
but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that
Why? If you assume that most of that money goes into paying for engineers and developers and distribution costs, why is it axiomatic that they must also be employed by google? If the work is good, and gets additional users to use a quickly developing browser instead of say, IE6, then mission accomplished. Firefox takes different decisions and has different emphasis than google, so if your stated goal is a well developed advancing client base, it makes sense to fund a 'competitor' in that the two different projects with different histories will meet the needs of more people than a single browser team can. Firefox has built up a lot of trust by ordinary users the last few years, a number of whom don't trust google enough to install their browser. It wasn't safari or opera that broke the back of the IE dominance, it was mozilla by offering a markedly more functional browser - and that has forced microsoft to resume work on their browser and compete again.
And after all, google tries to make advanced, compelling web apps in order to plonk adverts in as front as many eyes as possible. As any web developer who's had to build their site, and then break bits of it for IE6 in the last decade can appreciate, advanced browsers make it a hell of a lot easier to do that regardless of the name in the titlebar. And this is what microsoft feared and tried to stop for years - web-based, standards compliant advanced apps that run on any platform. When the browser is the platform, who cares what OS it runs on; and thus who needs to keep paying such extortionate prices for windows, and by extension, office? Obviously we're not there yet, and there will always be heavy duty stuff that can't be OS agnostic, but for most people, most of the time, it's becoming far less important what OS you have as long as it runs say, webmail, facebook and whatever sites you personally hang out on. We've cloud books, cloud music, cloud films, cloud email, cloud document apps, cloud productivity apps of whatever stripe, online banking, social networking, cloud photos, the list just keeps on growing. Just look at the roaring growth of smartphones, netbooks and tablets - most of what they're used for is a browser, apps that's basically some form-factor specific UI that gets or dumps everything onto some html5 website, or games.
Competition is good, and it means that people who aren't google can come up with ideas that we can all then benefit from, including google themselves. It's good that google themselves realise that.
Oops. copy-n-paste screwed up the link - the article showing the Nexus S uses the existing buttons in ICS is here.
The removal of the menu button only applies to the virtual buttons on the galaxy nexus, and honeycomb tablets that were already missing it. If you have physical buttons on your phone (including capacitive 'soft' pre-printed buttons) they're not going anywhere in ICS. The galaxy S has menu, home and back buttons that work just fine in ICS (and no virtual buttons like the galaxy nexus), and seeing that the nexus S has soft buttons, they're staying too (just confirmed that here [zdnet.com]). So until you upgrade to an ICS only phone that doesn't have dedicated buttons, you're fine. Even brand new phones like the droid razr have capacitive buttons due to launching with gingerbread. The galaxy nexus has such a huge screen they can afford to use virtual buttons like a tablet, but physical dedicated buttons are going to be around for a while yet on phones.
But I agree entirely that the moving around of the menu button inside apps is a bit irritating at time on honeycomb.
The toggles in notification shelf were never in stock builds, it's a Samsung thing. And yes, it's quite convenient.
Hah, never realised that. So samsung managed to improve something on android instead of make it worse? That's a first! Testing Notification Toggle now, and seems to do what it says on the tin, so thanks for that!
Couldn't agree more about the stock browser on the transformer; it's utter pants. On mine, it lets you do bookmarks, and they show up when typing in urls, but there's none listed under the bookmark tab. The dodgy text-input area, plus the insistance on putting proper urls through google search first (unless you manually put http:/// meant I long since switched to dolphinHD, then opera after the privacy webzine hoohah on dolphin.
Even in hacked-up beta stage, ICS on the galaxy S is damned impressive - it's faster than gingerbread, even without some GPU compositing for transitions. The browser is really really good, and dear god it's fast. Compare to putting iOS 5 on an iphone 3GS (the iphone that was out when I bought my galaxy S) which grinds it to a near halt, ICS is a big step forward in so many areas. Some of the functions (such as the running tasks) is clearly an evolution of honeycomb, but it always seemed rushed just to get something out on tablets, and isn't as slick as it should be. Can't wait to get it on my transformer too; I think the ICS version of the new tegra3 transformer will be a tablet that is honestly better than the ipad2 - though I love my current tranny, the ipad still edges it.
I'm tempted by a Galaxy Nexus now my contract term is coming up, but I'd miss the external microSD slot, especially as the 32GB version isn't shipping in the UK. Maybe the galaxy S3 (if it has a similar gorgeous high-dpi screen) will convert me, but ICS on the galaxy S is good enough for now!