I've developed 7 Android apps and the huge diversity of Android versions and devices out there really is a nightmare. I have an enormous number of extra code paths due to it. All this extra complexity makes apps tougher to write, tougher to test, tougher to debug, tougher to enhance.
Some examples of bizarre stuff I have to do: Android 1.5 has a Java NIO bug that forces me to copy data to a temporary array on its way to buffers to be rendered via OpenGL. This hurts performance on older phones that often need it the most. It also means I have to do more testing to make sure both code paths are well exercised. I bet many developers don't even realize the bug is there an just have broken OpenGL apps on Android 1.5. The bug fix would be trivial to port back to Android 1.5, which would make it drastically more likely to get on to these older phones, but there's no sign this will ever happen. Do I keep code paths like this? Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5? Neither is desirable.
Another really frustrating one is how I have to detect specific devices and request certain size depth buffers just to get decent performance. Hardware graphics acceleration is only enabled on the Samsung Galaxy for depth buffer size 16, for example, not for no depth buffer. Depth buffer size 24 works best on the Droid, etc.. The Galaxy has had this bug for a very long time. The Archos tablet has no hardware acceleration and there are promises that cheaper phones will be similar. Do I write all the extra code for adjusting rendering for each of these? Or do again give up large swaths of the market?
Anyway, I'm constantly dealing with issues like this. It is really disappointing that Android team, the carriers, and the device manufacturers don't do more to prevent it. Doing things like back porting fixes so that older phones can be more trivially updated would help enormous numbers of apps and app developers compared to the very few resources needed on Google's part to do it.
Meanwhile Google isn't even interested in solutions to these problems from what I've seen. One developer brought up another potential solution during a session at Google IO. He suggested making the highest level of Android a distributable framework, like.NET. This would allow updating it much easier. Not nearly as many phones would be stranded with old, buggy versions of the Java portion of Android at least. The Google staffers just brushed the idea off without even discussing it. They said fragmentation should really be called progress and to deal with it.
This isn't really surprising. If you look at a recent app produced by Google, the Twitter app, you'll see that it is unavailable to a huge percentage of the market because they don't support older versions of Android with it. Independent developers can't afford to ignore large sections of the marketplace like that. Google isn't in the app business, so the Googlers just go ahead and ignore the issue. You can see a graph of the versions of the devices on Android Market here: http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
And of course there are plenty of devices not on Google's market, many of which are even less likely to receive updates because they are updated by PC software rather than over the air.
So Googlers aren't even eating their own dog food on this issue. They just make app developers put up with it on their own, never experience it themselves, and then ridicule the issue as a bogeyman. I think I was happier before I read the blog post. At least then I could imagine they were working hard on the issue and just doing terrible at it. Now I know they don't even consider it an issue.
I'm surprised that Google sending a C&D letter to CyanogenMod didn't make the list. Google had been trying to market its cell phone OS, Android, as an open platform that welcomed innovation and contributions. Then they decided to threaten an immensely popular third party rom that did wonders for Android's performance.
The official distribution at the time had many issues. Performance degraded the longer you went without a reboot. You couldn't install apps on SD cards, only the tiny internal storage space, so quickly ran out of room for apps. CyanogenMod provided a great option for frustrated or highly technical users to get the performance and bleeding edge features they wanted.
Meanwhile Microsoft actually has a good reputation for turning a blind eye to people making roms for Windows Mobile. Google actually managed to make themselves look less open than Windows on this one. They also angered a lot of technical users who could have become Android evangelists.
Wow, this guy was working really hard to make MS look bad:
>Now anyone who's ever typed a DOS command will immediately realize that this >command isn't going to work-the cable tech certainly did-because Microsoft Guy >Number 2 has used forward slashes
Meanwhile using forward slashes works perfectly fine in the Vista command prompt for me.
I have bad eyesight as well, but I can actually use my Icuiti M920 head mounted display without them because it has a diopter adjustment. Looking at the pictures in the article, I can see the creator used an Icuiti DV920 to build off of, which also has this ability.
Of course he may have hacked that part off, or the amount it can be adjusted to may be insufficient for you.
Actually, being "relentless" is considered the prime advantage of tidal power. It isn't fickle like the wind. The biggest disadvantage is that biofouling is higher (shit grows on the machinery). The was an article on it in Newsweek the other day mentioning that tidal turbines are being placed in the East River in NYC and that the Navy is interested in them as well.
The science missions were rapidly becoming useless anyway. Search for life my ass, they should have been exploring how exploitable the mineral resources were.
It's time to dump the stupid navel gazing telescopes and put some money into actually doing things in space instead of just looking at them.
If you always just claim people are too expensive to send, you aren't going to develop very good engineering and technologies to send people. I'm glad we've broken out of this loop and will actually being doing something worthwhile in space again.
Amusing that you didn't counter him with facts like how the wonderful discoveries of archaeology have been so important to our culture. Oh, wait, they haven't. Better stick with your insults like you are doing then.
I wonder if he just pulled this out of his ass or something. Not only does my ISP traffic shape BT, they also block all the common ports that trackers use (you can change your client's ports easily, but the tracker owner has to change in this case).
There have been actual studies showing P2P traffic represents over 50% of consumer ISP traffic. An ISP would have to be stupid not to shape P2P.
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One of the other sites reporting on this mentioned:
In BMW's case the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German - over 40 times. The real home page, to which searchers were seamless redirected, only contained the word twice.
You seem to be completely ignoring the fact that there are multiple editors. It's entirely possible one editor will reject something that another won't.
Scientific American actually had an entire issue on the gender difference. The whole toys thing was addressed in one of them. They had a study where baby monkeys were given their choices of toys without any society pushing its values on them. Turns out the male monkeys like "spatial" things like balls and toy trucks that moved while the female monkeys preferred dolls. Most the other articles similarly had a lot of science indicating strong biological differences.
That picture he takes makes the area look pretty empty. I would actually be scared of another person being around while getting something that expensive from a vending machine. It doesn't take long to hold a knife on someone and grab it. Guess Japan is not like NYC.
Just like how irradiated food succeeded so brilliantly even though it is safe? Most people hear the word radiation or nuclear and that's it for them, logic never comes into play.
It's kind of sad to see instancing take over. To me it feels like the popularity of MMORPGs has climbed such that the players are almost all terrible now. Hardly any of them want to roleplay. What I used to call competition they call griefing. PvP is rarely allowed or otherwise it is utterly nerfed (eg. you don't lose lots of levels and equipment when you die). Some people spend all their time levling as if it actually mattered. Oo
Why are these people playing MMO if they just want instances? Go play a normal multiplayer game if you don't want to interact with others to create a world. The unpredictability of who you meet, team up with, and kill in an MMO is one of the greatest things and these people want to remove it. MMO isn't supposed to be a chat room, it's supposed to be something above and beyond what you can get playing against a computer.
That's bad meta moderation. The proper moderation is for the first one to be modded up and any following ones modded redundant. An additional problem with meta moderating unfair is that it even punishes people who did the moderation before the later posts showed up.
Well my reason is that I simply don't have time to watch TV at home anymore. PSP I can watch on the train and shit, where my options are much more limited.
Agreed. Briggs could even have made lemonade without going commercial. I run a porn site and people hotlink/inline images from the free gallery all the time. I have mod_rewrite redirecting those requests to a PHP script that sticks my site name on the bottom of the image, though.
Most of the time when the posters realize the images they inlined now have logos stuck on they still leave the images there. So it's great free advertising for me. People see my site recommended by people other by me and in lots of places.
How did the parent get marked insightful? The guy is clueless and probably doesn't even own a Blizzard game. I bought Starcraft when it first came out and Battle.NET was compeltely inaccessible from college, probably due to the firewall which almost all coleges have.
Playing from home was no joy ride either. You experienced drops a hell of a lot more often than when running your own server to play with friends in the neighborhood.
Also the LAN multiplayer was terribly implemented. There wasn't a single LAN game in the dorms where someone couldn't see the game or couldn't join, etc.. Once we started using our own bnet server all this went away and the game actually worked.
People circumvented Blizzard's shitty implementation and cheap ass servers and saved the playability of the game.
The few Japanese I know personally don't even admit their country used prisoners as slave labor during the war, or that it had no business in SE Asia. Their textbooks and education differ significantly from ours, so keep in mind that any conclusions you hear are based on entirely different data. The one person I talked to in detail said that the US started the war (due to the economic sanctions unjustly crippling Japan).
The articles (I read all four parts) mention how story and character development is one of the greatest strengths of adventure games. It then completely ignores that and says the way to save adventure games is to experiment more and take things from other generes. He praises adding things like real time 3D engines and direct character movement.
His recommendations actually impede the development of good stories, however. I stopped playing Final Fantasy games because it got boring as hell walking through those huge 3D scenes. They just slow down getting on with something interesting. Similarly, adding useless crap like that will just make an adventure game boring.
A far worse effect, however, is that the more options you add, the less story you can have. The more branches there are in your game, the smaller the amount of time story writers can spend on each. This means less will happen and characters will tend to stay the same on all branches so that more common material can be used.
Japanese adventure games are hugely, enormously popular. They have whole animated series produced following the same story lines as the games. It's not just erotic content, either, because many of these games get put on consoles with the erotic content removed and are still successful.
These games tend to have very few options or puzzles, though. It's not uncommon for walkthroughs to like 10-20 decision points and that's it. The huge benefit here, though, is that your story writers can write very detailed, dramatic story lines that take place in these branches.
The articles claim adventure games aren't dead. But the writer is the one recommending killing them.
Be very careful doing this sort of thing if you ever want to resell your home. I sold a home I inherited recently that had a small pull down stair installed in the ceiling to the attic. This meant a joist was cut and the opening boxed in.
The buyer's inspector was claiming this counted as something like 5-10k damage as it violated the engineering plans/inspections/whatever for the house. God knows what my real estate agent did about it, but that number dwarfs the 50$ cost of the dome mentioned in the article.
> Is anyone really browsing the web from their cell phone? PDA?
Definite yes for PDA here. I have a VGA resolution Zaurus and am constantly using the browser. Even when offline I have entire websites and books saved in HTML ready for use.
One thing it's been particularly good for is going to big conventions and events, but still having the entire contents of the event's website (including forums if any) in my pocket.
Anyone else find it amusing that these "purist" people haven't even read the official specification? It's clearly stated at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ that you are allowed to send XHTML 1.0 (which is what most sites are using) as text/html and they even give you an appendix full of compatibility tips when doing so.
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I've developed 7 Android apps and the huge diversity of Android versions and devices out there really is a nightmare. I have an enormous number of extra code paths due to it. All this extra complexity makes apps tougher to write, tougher to test, tougher to debug, tougher to enhance.
Some examples of bizarre stuff I have to do:
Android 1.5 has a Java NIO bug that forces me to copy data to a temporary array on its way to buffers to be rendered via OpenGL. This hurts performance on older phones that often need it the most. It also means I have to do more testing to make sure both code paths are well exercised. I bet many developers don't even realize the bug is there an just have broken OpenGL apps on Android 1.5. The bug fix would be trivial to port back to Android 1.5, which would make it drastically more likely to get on to these older phones, but there's no sign this will ever happen. Do I keep code paths like this? Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5? Neither is desirable.
Another really frustrating one is how I have to detect specific devices and request certain size depth buffers just to get decent performance. Hardware graphics acceleration is only enabled on the Samsung Galaxy for depth buffer size 16, for example, not for no depth buffer. Depth buffer size 24 works best on the Droid, etc.. The Galaxy has had this bug for a very long time. The Archos tablet has no hardware acceleration and there are promises that cheaper phones will be similar. Do I write all the extra code for adjusting rendering for each of these? Or do again give up large swaths of the market?
Anyway, I'm constantly dealing with issues like this. It is really disappointing that Android team, the carriers, and the device manufacturers don't do more to prevent it. Doing things like back porting fixes so that older phones can be more trivially updated would help enormous numbers of apps and app developers compared to the very few resources needed on Google's part to do it.
Meanwhile Google isn't even interested in solutions to these problems from what I've seen. One developer brought up another potential solution during a session at Google IO. He suggested making the highest level of Android a distributable framework, like .NET. This would allow updating it much easier. Not nearly as many phones would be stranded with old, buggy versions of the Java portion of Android at least. The Google staffers just brushed the idea off without even discussing it. They said fragmentation should really be called progress and to deal with it.
This isn't really surprising. If you look at a recent app produced by Google, the Twitter app, you'll see that it is unavailable to a huge percentage of the market because they don't support older versions of Android with it. Independent developers can't afford to ignore large sections of the marketplace like that. Google isn't in the app business, so the Googlers just go ahead and ignore the issue. You can see a graph of the versions of the devices on Android Market here:
http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
And of course there are plenty of devices not on Google's market, many of which are even less likely to receive updates because they are updated by PC software rather than over the air.
So Googlers aren't even eating their own dog food on this issue. They just make app developers put up with it on their own, never experience it themselves, and then ridicule the issue as a bogeyman. I think I was happier before I read the blog post. At least then I could imagine they were working hard on the issue and just doing terrible at it. Now I know they don't even consider it an issue.
I'm surprised that Google sending a C&D letter to CyanogenMod didn't make the list. Google had been trying to market its cell phone OS, Android, as an open platform that welcomed innovation and contributions. Then they decided to threaten an immensely popular third party rom that did wonders for Android's performance.
The official distribution at the time had many issues. Performance degraded the longer you went without a reboot. You couldn't install apps on SD cards, only the tiny internal storage space, so quickly ran out of room for apps. CyanogenMod provided a great option for frustrated or highly technical users to get the performance and bleeding edge features they wanted.
Meanwhile Microsoft actually has a good reputation for turning a blind eye to people making roms for Windows Mobile. Google actually managed to make themselves look less open than Windows on this one. They also angered a lot of technical users who could have become Android evangelists.
Wow, this guy was working really hard to make MS look bad:
>Now anyone who's ever typed a DOS command will immediately realize that this
>command isn't going to work-the cable tech certainly did-because Microsoft Guy
>Number 2 has used forward slashes
Meanwhile using forward slashes works perfectly fine in the Vista command prompt for me.
I have bad eyesight as well, but I can actually use my Icuiti M920 head mounted display without them because it has a diopter adjustment. Looking at the pictures in the article, I can see the creator used an Icuiti DV920 to build off of, which also has this ability.
Of course he may have hacked that part off, or the amount it can be adjusted to may be insufficient for you.
I heard that when Japan officially simplified the language a lot of people protested by naming their children using kanji that weren't included.
Actually, being "relentless" is considered the prime advantage of tidal power. It isn't fickle like the wind. The biggest disadvantage is that biofouling is higher (shit grows on the machinery). The was an article on it in Newsweek the other day mentioning that tidal turbines are being placed in the East River in NYC and that the Navy is interested in them as well.
The science missions were rapidly becoming useless anyway. Search for life my ass, they should have been exploring how exploitable the mineral resources were.
It's time to dump the stupid navel gazing telescopes and put some money into actually doing things in space instead of just looking at them.
If you always just claim people are too expensive to send, you aren't going to develop very good engineering and technologies to send people. I'm glad we've broken out of this loop and will actually being doing something worthwhile in space again.
Amusing that you didn't counter him with facts like how the wonderful discoveries of archaeology have been so important to our culture. Oh, wait, they haven't. Better stick with your insults like you are doing then.
>Most ISPs don't do such shaping
I wonder if he just pulled this out of his ass or something. Not only does my ISP traffic shape BT, they also block all the common ports that trackers use (you can change your client's ports easily, but the tracker owner has to change in this case).
There have been actual studies showing P2P traffic represents over 50% of consumer ISP traffic. An ISP would have to be stupid not to shape P2P.
Sounds like fraud to me.
You seem to be completely ignoring the fact that there are multiple editors. It's entirely possible one editor will reject something that another won't.
Scientific American actually had an entire issue on the gender difference. The whole toys thing was addressed in one of them. They had a study where baby monkeys were given their choices of toys without any society pushing its values on them. Turns out the male monkeys like "spatial" things like balls and toy trucks that moved while the female monkeys preferred dolls. Most the other articles similarly had a lot of science indicating strong biological differences.
That picture he takes makes the area look pretty empty. I would actually be scared of another person being around while getting something that expensive from a vending machine. It doesn't take long to hold a knife on someone and grab it. Guess Japan is not like NYC.
Just like how irradiated food succeeded so brilliantly even though it is safe? Most people hear the word radiation or nuclear and that's it for them, logic never comes into play.
It's kind of sad to see instancing take over. To me it feels like the popularity of MMORPGs has climbed such that the players are almost all terrible now. Hardly any of them want to roleplay. What I used to call competition they call griefing. PvP is rarely allowed or otherwise it is utterly nerfed (eg. you don't lose lots of levels and equipment when you die). Some people spend all their time levling as if it actually mattered. Oo
Why are these people playing MMO if they just want instances? Go play a normal multiplayer game if you don't want to interact with others to create a world. The unpredictability of who you meet, team up with, and kill in an MMO is one of the greatest things and these people want to remove it. MMO isn't supposed to be a chat room, it's supposed to be something above and beyond what you can get playing against a computer.
That's bad meta moderation. The proper moderation is for the first one to be modded up and any following ones modded redundant. An additional problem with meta moderating unfair is that it even punishes people who did the moderation before the later posts showed up.
Well my reason is that I simply don't have time to watch TV at home anymore. PSP I can watch on the train and shit, where my options are much more limited.
lol, someone spamming referral links in a fake sig to force people to see them talking about avoiding spam. nice.
Agreed. Briggs could even have made lemonade without going commercial. I run a porn site and people hotlink/inline images from the free gallery all the time. I have mod_rewrite redirecting those requests to a PHP script that sticks my site name on the bottom of the image, though.
Most of the time when the posters realize the images they inlined now have logos stuck on they still leave the images there. So it's great free advertising for me. People see my site recommended by people other by me and in lots of places.
How did the parent get marked insightful? The guy is clueless and probably doesn't even own a Blizzard game. I bought Starcraft when it first came out and Battle.NET was compeltely inaccessible from college, probably due to the firewall which almost all coleges have.
Playing from home was no joy ride either. You experienced drops a hell of a lot more often than when running your own server to play with friends in the neighborhood.
Also the LAN multiplayer was terribly implemented. There wasn't a single LAN game in the dorms where someone couldn't see the game or couldn't join, etc.. Once we started using our own bnet server all this went away and the game actually worked.
People circumvented Blizzard's shitty implementation and cheap ass servers and saved the playability of the game.
The few Japanese I know personally don't even admit their country used prisoners as slave labor during the war, or that it had no business in SE Asia. Their textbooks and education differ significantly from ours, so keep in mind that any conclusions you hear are based on entirely different data. The one person I talked to in detail said that the US started the war (due to the economic sanctions unjustly crippling Japan).
The articles (I read all four parts) mention how story and character development is one of the greatest strengths of adventure games. It then completely ignores that and says the way to save adventure games is to experiment more and take things from other generes. He praises adding things like real time 3D engines and direct character movement.
His recommendations actually impede the development of good stories, however. I stopped playing Final Fantasy games because it got boring as hell walking through those huge 3D scenes. They just slow down getting on with something interesting. Similarly, adding useless crap like that will just make an adventure game boring.
A far worse effect, however, is that the more options you add, the less story you can have. The more branches there are in your game, the smaller the amount of time story writers can spend on each. This means less will happen and characters will tend to stay the same on all branches so that more common material can be used.
Japanese adventure games are hugely, enormously popular. They have whole animated series produced following the same story lines as the games. It's not just erotic content, either, because many of these games get put on consoles with the erotic content removed and are still successful.
These games tend to have very few options or puzzles, though. It's not uncommon for walkthroughs to like 10-20 decision points and that's it. The huge benefit here, though, is that your story writers can write very detailed, dramatic story lines that take place in these branches.
The articles claim adventure games aren't dead. But the writer is the one recommending killing them.
Be very careful doing this sort of thing if you ever want to resell your home. I sold a home I inherited recently that had a small pull down stair installed in the ceiling to the attic. This meant a joist was cut and the opening boxed in.
The buyer's inspector was claiming this counted as something like 5-10k damage as it violated the engineering plans/inspections/whatever for the house. God knows what my real estate agent did about it, but that number dwarfs the 50$ cost of the dome mentioned in the article.
> Is anyone really browsing the web from their cell phone? PDA?
Definite yes for PDA here. I have a VGA resolution Zaurus and am constantly using the browser. Even when offline I have entire websites and books saved in HTML ready for use.
One thing it's been particularly good for is going to big conventions and events, but still having the entire contents of the event's website (including forums if any) in my pocket.
>Yes, I'm a purist like that.
Anyone else find it amusing that these "purist" people haven't even read the official specification? It's clearly stated at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ that you are allowed to send XHTML 1.0 (which is what most sites are using) as text/html and they even give you an appendix full of compatibility tips when doing so.