So you don't know real situations of people being pulled out of their cars through the window and slammed on the ground for speeding? How about being left in a cage elevator for hours being sent up and down between floors of the station for the cops' entertainment while inebriated? For that matter, watch Cops, and wonder to yourself why they're slamming a woman into the ground with a knee on the back of her neck for being high when she wasn't resisting.
I know a lot of good cops. I can't guarantee that's the one who will pull me over though.
The features that didn't exist before wouldn't exist today if they wanted to make you happy.
The options are either properly predicting the future and making all future features available in advance, but not letting them work (since they can't yet), or waiting till those features are relevant and adding them to the api.
Either way, unless you want a stagnant platform that never evolves, you're going to have API changes to deal with.
On that note, how come my 1994 Newton MessagePad doesn't understand XML? Yeah.
I'm not sure what you want Google to do about this. Do you want Google to dictate a certain hardware spec to all the vendors? If you favor a consistent platform (more or less) from a well-known set of hardware on a single carrier, you should go with Apple.
This is simply software engineering - taking one set of trade-offs for others. If you want newer features, you target the later API, at the cost of a smaller audience. These are all very straight-forward cost/benefit decisions, that YOU get to make, not Google. This is the strength of the open platform.
This is my thoughts exactly.
You're gaining a huge install base by having Android compatible with multiple handsets. People like choosing different feature sets, not everyone wants a keyboard for example, but some wouldn't live without one. Some people will pay extra for a phone with excellent gaming performance, others won't care.
This is akin to figuring out if a hypothetical game will run on User X's computer. Ship the game for a console if you don't want to deal with it.
To be fair, for the wide variety of devices Android supports, there are very very few compatibility glitches.
This is a problem with a combination of poor APIs and lazy programming usually. On Windows this happens all the time because the tools for making UIs worked in pixels, which made scaling a problem. How many of you have heard a user complain that raising their screen resolution "made everything smaller". A 12 point font should be 12 points no matter the resolution. Points aren't defined in pixels but as fractions of an inch.
Resolution issues are best handled with APIs that are pixel-agnostic whenever they can be, postscript comes to mind as an excellent example. That said, programmer awareness makes a big difference too.
I run a 1.6 Android phone. I heard that Google Earth was out and searched it. No such app.
Neat trick, keeping me from installing something that wouldn't work on my phone, but I'd prefer "This app is not compatible with your device" and removing the 'install' option perhaps.
Funny, none of the things you listed seem valuable to the tune of a database system. And I actually work for a database vendor, so you'd think I'd be biased the other way.
We did the same thing, right back to grade one. My daughter's class goes to the library essentially alone (a teacher supervising) in grade two. They have no problems checking out books at all.
From the way that was written it sounds like the author just doesn't like biometrics and chose the lowest quality systems he could find.
Did you read the article? The gummy fingerprint can be used with a real finger behind it. Unless you're doing skin refraction tests to determine natural skin from fake, he's probably going to get through. Also noteworthy, the entry's from 2002.
Notably, this is Bruce Schneier's blog, not some random crackpot who posts anything and everything.
For a native build, the default configuration is to perform a 3-stage bootstrap of the compiler when `make' is invoked. This will build the entire GCC system and ensure that it compiles itself correctly. It can be disabled with the --disable-bootstrap parameter to `configure', but bootstrapping is suggested because the compiler will be tested more completely and could also have better performance.
The bootstrapping process will complete the following steps:
Build tools necessary to build the compiler.
Perform a 3-stage bootstrap of the compiler. This includes building three times the target tools for use by the compiler such as binutils (bfd, binutils, gas, gprof, ld, and opcodes) if they have been individually linked or moved into the top level GCC source tree before configuring.
Perform a comparison test of the stage2 and stage3 compilers.
Build runtime libraries using the stage3 compiler from the previous step.
I get your point, except that you should change your gaming password now anyway. It might have been you, it might not have, and your creds. might've been stolen by someone else entirely.
Explaining this would be like explaining a joke... totally loses its point.
Natal is a 1.0 release. Everyone knows you wait for a 3.0 release before Microsoft gets something right, from Windows to IE to Excel, etc.
Service packs are just a way of Microsoft doing updates that they don't charge for, there's no functional difference between releasing XP SP7 and releasing Vista for example, its just that they want to sell a new product with new branding and so on.
Either way you're talking about versions. Windows 7 SP2 isn't going to be the second (or third) release of Windows, its the 15th or more release of Windows.
The first part of your statement is very true. Copyright limits what people can do with the software. The distribution is illegal because Copyright prohibits it. The GPL permits the distribution with limits, if you don't want to abide the GPL, you're a Copyright violator and the DMCA applies.
It also handles paragraph and other formatting options much more cleanly once you grasp its styles system, and seems to handle very large documents better than any version of Word I've used.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have excellent mail merge options yet, but I may not have fully grasped what they're doing there.
Increasing video compression is easy if you're willing to use variable bit rates and increase it dramatically in action sequences with lots of movement and ignore macroblocks growing out of all similarly-coloured areas.
Watching Transformers on BD on my PS3 with details turned on shows how the bitrate changes dramatically even from scene to scene in that movie. If specific sets of frames require 30Mbit/s to reproduce well, are you willing to commit that much bandwidth to them? If not, those scenes will always blur or have massive artifacts.
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So you don't know real situations of people being pulled out of their cars through the window and slammed on the ground for speeding? How about being left in a cage elevator for hours being sent up and down between floors of the station for the cops' entertainment while inebriated? For that matter, watch Cops, and wonder to yourself why they're slamming a woman into the ground with a knee on the back of her neck for being high when she wasn't resisting.
I know a lot of good cops. I can't guarantee that's the one who will pull me over though.
Its exactly the point. If new iphones come out with lets say dual cameras, the new OS and API will support that but the old phones never will.
New features will always cause fragmentation. Your only way out is to stagnate in hardware development or to have perfect forward knowledge.
Your statement is a red herring.
The features that didn't exist before wouldn't exist today if they wanted to make you happy.
The options are either properly predicting the future and making all future features available in advance, but not letting them work (since they can't yet), or waiting till those features are relevant and adding them to the api.
Either way, unless you want a stagnant platform that never evolves, you're going to have API changes to deal with.
On that note, how come my 1994 Newton MessagePad doesn't understand XML? Yeah.
You know if you posted other than AC you could answer this ...
But have you seen how the permissions work on Android?
When installing this app you'd have to give it permission to do the things it does. It asks explicitly.
Responding on behalf of the parent, the software has to be installed first. Manually.
Now sure, someone borrowing your phone might do it, but the software has to get onto your phone and be permitted to make these changes first.
This type of rootkit already exists in the form of phone locator software.
Why is addition math and not just addition?
Infographic is a superset.
You're misdefining unreasonable to mean unrequired.
This is my thoughts exactly.
You're gaining a huge install base by having Android compatible with multiple handsets. People like choosing different feature sets, not everyone wants a keyboard for example, but some wouldn't live without one. Some people will pay extra for a phone with excellent gaming performance, others won't care.
This is akin to figuring out if a hypothetical game will run on User X's computer. Ship the game for a console if you don't want to deal with it.
To be fair, for the wide variety of devices Android supports, there are very very few compatibility glitches.
This is a problem with a combination of poor APIs and lazy programming usually. On Windows this happens all the time because the tools for making UIs worked in pixels, which made scaling a problem. How many of you have heard a user complain that raising their screen resolution "made everything smaller". A 12 point font should be 12 points no matter the resolution. Points aren't defined in pixels but as fractions of an inch.
Resolution issues are best handled with APIs that are pixel-agnostic whenever they can be, postscript comes to mind as an excellent example. That said, programmer awareness makes a big difference too.
I run a 1.6 Android phone. I heard that Google Earth was out and searched it. No such app.
Neat trick, keeping me from installing something that wouldn't work on my phone, but I'd prefer "This app is not compatible with your device" and removing the 'install' option perhaps.
At any rate, a minor user interface change.
Funny, none of the things you listed seem valuable to the tune of a database system. And I actually work for a database vendor, so you'd think I'd be biased the other way.
We did the same thing, right back to grade one. My daughter's class goes to the library essentially alone (a teacher supervising) in grade two. They have no problems checking out books at all.
Did you read the article? The gummy fingerprint can be used with a real finger behind it. Unless you're doing skin refraction tests to determine natural skin from fake, he's probably going to get through. Also noteworthy, the entry's from 2002.
Notably, this is Bruce Schneier's blog, not some random crackpot who posts anything and everything.
Or even from the GCC build instructions:
Some of us have Android phones with keyboards :)
Not to mention you can get a black edition (overclockable) AMD Phenom II X4 (four cores) for $50 less than that 2 core Intel proc.
This isn't competitive.
Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy on for size.
Quit being so a navel-gazer and believing the whole world should operate the way your corner does.
Proud to be Canadian with sane Copyright laws. cf. Judge: File sharing legal in Canada.
I get your point, except that you should change your gaming password now anyway. It might have been you, it might not have, and your creds. might've been stolen by someone else entirely.
Change your passwords anyway.
Explaining this would be like explaining a joke ... totally loses its point.
Natal is a 1.0 release. Everyone knows you wait for a 3.0 release before Microsoft gets something right, from Windows to IE to Excel, etc.
Service packs are just a way of Microsoft doing updates that they don't charge for, there's no functional difference between releasing XP SP7 and releasing Vista for example, its just that they want to sell a new product with new branding and so on.
Either way you're talking about versions. Windows 7 SP2 isn't going to be the second (or third) release of Windows, its the 15th or more release of Windows.
What previous Apple products have been opened after commoditization? None that I know of.
I doubt Apple will start now.
As Copyright holder, nobody has a right to your code.
If you want to borrow other peoples' code without restrictions on usage, pay them a licensing fee.
That's why Copyright transfer agreements exist for large projects like say Zope.
Their code is, but without breaking Apple's rules or ponying up for a dev phone, they can't run their own code on their own phones can they?
That's pretty funny really.
The first part of your statement is very true. Copyright limits what people can do with the software. The distribution is illegal because Copyright prohibits it. The GPL permits the distribution with limits, if you don't want to abide the GPL, you're a Copyright violator and the DMCA applies.
It also handles paragraph and other formatting options much more cleanly once you grasp its styles system, and seems to handle very large documents better than any version of Word I've used.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have excellent mail merge options yet, but I may not have fully grasped what they're doing there.
Increasing video compression is easy if you're willing to use variable bit rates and increase it dramatically in action sequences with lots of movement and ignore macroblocks growing out of all similarly-coloured areas.
Watching Transformers on BD on my PS3 with details turned on shows how the bitrate changes dramatically even from scene to scene in that movie. If specific sets of frames require 30Mbit/s to reproduce well, are you willing to commit that much bandwidth to them? If not, those scenes will always blur or have massive artifacts.